Welcome to the Supply Chain Research Blog!

At Get Loose, we are excited about a less wasteful future. We want to extend the waste prevention work we do in the shop. We have been trialling projects such as the information screen (that can be seen in the entrance to Hackney City Farm) for some time now, with great success. According to our focus groups and surveys, people have learnt tips and are amazed at what fantastic events lie just on their doorstep.

In this blog, we aim to document our supply chain work. We want to see where waste prevention is working well in our supply chains, see where these solutions could be replicated and look into trialling and expanding ideas that create a less wasteful world.

All this administration work will be funded by the revenue of the shop, and we need an increase in our profits to be able to finance the labour. In order to do this we are currently running a marketing campaign to increase our sales and expanding our product range so customers can get more of what they need in our little shop.

A trialled example of the work we want to do:

Problem: Glass recycling is CO2 intensive, we wanted to see where glass could be reused rather than recycled

Obstacles: The removal of labels and the washing necessary to make glassware safe to be reused

Steps we took:

We found out that Carley’s (our nut butter supplier) is trialling a new label that easily peels off. This was a good lead for the label problem
Hook and Son (our milk supplier) already have proof way of washing and reusing their milk bottles.
Biona (our apple and orange juice supplier) were using the same bottles that Hook and Son were using.
We enquired with Biona to see if they would be interested in using the easy to peel label
We enquired with Hook and Son to see if they would be up for using these Biona bottles.

Unfortunately Biona changed the size of their bottles so they were no longer the same as Hook and Son’s bottle so this stunted this particular reuse project.

When we raise the sales needed to pay for this administration work we shall continue where we left off and see what can be achieved in reducing waste within our supply chain.

If all goes to plan expect a Supply Chain Waste Prevention Blog in early 2022 : )