Member Article

Ethical British school uniform supplier, YourSchoolUniform.com, teams up with new recycling service and campaigns for affordable prices for

A British school uniform supplier has partnered with a recycling initiative to help the environment and to ensure disadvantaged parents have access to high quality school wear for their children.

YourSchoolUniform.com is excited to be involved with such an important campaign and is passionate about helping protect the environment. The company has also announced their support for a change in the law designed to ensure school uniform is cost effective, which continues to cement their values.

YourSchoolUniform.com, based in Clay Cross, Chesterfield, is the pioneer of online school uniform services and is committed to a fair pricing policy. The company has teamed up with Uniformerly, a new free to use school uniform marketplace that allows parents and Parent Teacher Associations to buy, sell and give away outgrown school uniform to parents at their school.

Director, Carolyn Budding, said: “We’re right behind both of these campaigns. Our partnership with Uniformerly offers schools and parents an online marketplace to recycle outgrown items of uniform.

“Our school uniform is durable and hard wearing and we support Uniformerly’s strapline of ‘Wear it out. Don’t throw it out.’ Working with them we can help tackle Britain’s throwaway culture to promote a circular economy through our joint Repair, Re-use and Recycle philosophy.” See www.uniformerly.co.uk.

“At the same time, there are parents on lower wages who need support and the School Uniform Bill addresses that.”

Carolyn said that YourSchoolUniform.com has long-standing commitments to both high environmental standards and to competitive uniform pricing.

On the environment, YourSchoolUniform.com is committed to maintaining full control over how its garments are produced and continue to enforce a no-landfill, low environmental impact policy for the company’s waste and low energy solutions.

“We’re confident that our ethical credentials are as solid as they can be to the point where we sell a garment, but the question has always been what happens next? Teaming up with Uniformerly provides the missing piece of our jigsaw. For years we have worked with a number of charities, donating surplus uniform for children in deprived countries to wear, however, we did not have a solution for recycling uniform that had simply been outgrown and was still perfectly serviceable for school uniform here in the UK.”

Simon Gossling, Co-founder, of Uniformerly said: “We created Uniformerly to help parents with access to affordable school uniform. Working together with YourSchoolUniform.com, we will be able to recycle and re-use even more school uniform across the UK than we could working alone - not only helping parents to cut costs but also helping to significantly reduce the amount of clothing waste going to landfill. We welcome this forward thinking approach to sustainable uniform from one of the UK’s leading uniform suppliers and look forward to working together.”

YourSchoolUniform.com has the ability to maintain the highest possible standards because it sources its garments direct from its manufacturing partners.
All Factories are validated using SEDEX (Supplier Ethical Data Exchange) ethical trading audits, giving assurance that: • Local employment laws are followed. • Employment is freely chosen, without employee deposits. • Child labour is not used. • Working conditions are safe and hygienic. • Working hours are not excessive. • No harsh or inhumane treatment is allowed. • Workers are interviewed for feedback.

Additionally, all chemicals used in the production of the company’s garments are REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals) compliant. Parents are therefore safe in the knowledge that any chemical used in the production of our uniform will not harm their child, nor is it harmful to the environment during the production process.

Further action includes the use of sea freight for transportation, rather than environmentally unfriendly air freight, and a commitment to first class environmental standards in the company’s modern Clay Cross warehouse, with LED lighting, efficient heating and good standards of insulation.

The company partners with locally-based Peak Waste Limited to handle all waste material. Peak Waste has avoided using landfill for over 12 years. Waste from YourSchoolUniform.com is manually sorted; recyclable materials are segregated for reprocessing and residual waste is shredded for use in a Waste to Energy facility.

The legislation in Parliament addresses the issue of affordability for less well-off parents. The Government introduced non-statutory guidance for schools in 2013 to help to reduce this annual expense and the new Bill builds on this.

John Adams, Sales Director, YourSchoolUniform.com Limited, explained: “Controlling the cost of our uniform has long been at the core of our business, making us one of the most competitive school uniform providers in the UK. We thoroughly support efforts to reduce school uniform costs and are strongly aligned to the spirit of the coming statutory guidance.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Nigel Howle .