BIBLIOPHILE BOOKS LTD ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY   

Policy Statement

Bibliophile Books, a small privately owned bookselling business based in East London, recognises its responsibilities and impact on the environment and the community in its role as a local business, employer, service industry provider and consumer.

We regularly review our environmental impact and follow best practices which make commercial sense.

• The nature of our business is one of recycling in its very essence.  Directly due to publishers overprinting books, we buy remaining stock in order that books are not pulped.  By selling these books at vastly reduced prices we are able to find them a happy home.  In our 31 year history Bibliophile Books has never pulped a book. From the premises in East London we fulfil book orders by picking, packing and despatching. 

• Waste and Recycling Our working practices include recycling publisher's boxes and buying in recycled boxes in addition which are plain and not overprinted.  We rent two large refuse containers and staff is instructed to recycle any waste after sorting using the green bins. Paper is shredded in an industrial shredder and used as filler for the book parcels.
• Our advertising material is in the form of a newspaper style catalogue printed on 100% recycled paper, environmentally sourced by our printers.  We control our mailing list and routinely prune out non-buyers, deceased and gone away addresses in order that the fewest possible catalogues are printed. These are then despatched on a 7-10 day service in bulk, never priority as this has an inherent additional environmental impact.
• More and more company correspondence and paperwork is sent by e-mail rather than printed letter.  In terms of output, we print receipt notes to enclose in the book parcels making a combined statement of the financial transaction and order details so as to avoid posting a second document.
• Unwanted pallets from book deliveries are recycled or sold in the local industrial estate.

• Onsite Energy Usage We operate a “Turn Off” policy: energy is managed by only switching on lights as marked by a colour coded system. At night computers are powered down. The building is monitored for consumption of gas and heated only as and when the staff require by central heating or space heater. This way we can control hours of heating and changes in weather and find it an efficient way to heat the space.

• Transport The Company owns no commercial vehicles.  Collect Plus is a new service we were among the first to adopt whereby a customer may choose to collect the package from a local nominated shop resulting in fewer wasted delivery journeys. For deliveries of our goods we use Royal Mail and agree with their environmental policies and use Yodel (formerly HDNL) for our heavier parcels to consolidate packages to UK locations for bulk despatch. We offer no overnight or 24 hour service which reduces the use of half empty vans.
• We have few customers abroad and therefore have minimum impact from airline transportation in operating the business. Many of our books are imported from the USA and Canada and this is done by consolidation and the final 25 or so miles from our freight forwarder to our warehouse is by lorry load at a time.
• None of our staff have to travel more than five miles to work since we employ local people, four of whom travel by car and the other 10 either walk or use public transport.

• Health & Safety We regularly have Health and Safety checks, maintain a clean working environment and routinely maintain our forklift truck, other machinery and computers.

Purpose and Scope

The Policy Statement makes clear to all concerned that we are committed to the highest of environmental standards mindful that this is a challenge for every size of business.

Responsibilities

Each member of staff must play their part as appropriate and be guided by the Directorship. 

Policy Owner:

Annie Quigley

Director, Bibliophile Books