Doing the Right Thing - Environmental and Social Impact

Do The Right Thing

We are not a fan of greenwashing and using environmental claims to try and sell more products. We hope the below gives customers who are interested a bit of a detailed breakdown of what we are doing, or at least trying to do. We are by no means perfect but hopefully, you can see we are trying and always up for learning and improving, so if you have any ideas drop us an email, and we will alwyas take them on board.

Buy Once Buy Right

Shore is owned wholly by Simon the founder and his family. We have no external big bank funds or accountants pulling the strings, and everything we do is for the love of the sports we sell and to continue to supply the highest quality products. We have always set out to sell the best equipment and the right equipment to our customers, meaning hopefully they only ever need to buy once and buy something that lasts.

Energy

At Shore we operate from 2 locations, our Warehouse and our Store, both are within a mile of each other on the sunny south coast of the UK. We have a new 16KwH solar array on our warehouse plus a Tesla Powerwall battery pack. This means that at the time of writing, more than 3/4 of all the electricity we have used at our warehouse has been self-generated from the sun. The other part and all the energy we use in our store is purchased from renewable tariffs. Interestingly, where we are based is very close to some major offshore wind farms and large commercial solar arrays, therefore we expect the actual electricity we use to have a relatively low carbon footprint vs being based near a coal-powered power station etc. We hope to install a similar solar and battery solution at our Store soon.

Website Hosting

Our website hosting company also uses renewable tariffs therefore we may be able to claim that your entire purchase from Shore from clicking onto the website to the order being picked and packed under the lights and using the computers and printers at our warehouse is over 75% powered by electricity we have generated by solar and the rest from renewables. We are hesitant to shout about this but we think the logic is there.

Packaging

This is our biggest headache and the area we are struggling the most to improve. We would love to use paper packaging, however the cost and access to these products for a business of our size and scale is almost impossible to work financially viable. We feel our current option of bags made from wholly recycled material and that are recyclable is the best compromise we can find at the moment however we are on the hunt for other options and are in talks with our suppliers to form a UK buying group for all surf shops so we can leverage our buying power as an industry to lower the cost of access to more sustainable routes.

Re-using packaging

We get a lot of boxes delivered to our warehouse and therefore we try as hard as we can to reuse this package to ship items out to customers. Some customers don't like this and we do get complaints but we feel its surely better to give a cardboard box another life and another journey than sending it off to be recycled after only one use. The product inside is always brand new and protected, just sometimes the box might be a little scruffy

Wittering Beach Clean

We offer anybody the opportunity to come into the shop 7 days a week and take a bucket, litter picker, and gloves down to the beach to help pick up anything washed up along the foreshore. Since inception, we have done over 1000 beach cleans and collected roughly 10 tonnes of material from the beach. We then work with the local council to safely recycle what we can and dispose of the rest.

Employing Local People

Shore is based on a peninsula with only one road in and one road out. We love where we are based, but employment opportunities in the area are limited with the nearest city being 7 miles away and local traffic at peak times can be pretty terrible. We feel it's really important to employ local people. That's why 90% of our staff live within 2 miles of our shop and HQ, meaning we are saving 1000s of miles of car journeys a year and help keep people off the roads. We encourage all staff who live locally to cycle or walk in by offering showers in our warehouse and bike storage areas.

Tax

We believe this is overlooked when companies talk about being sustainable and trying to prove they do the right thing. Shore is a business and the aim is to make a profit to continue the journey. We do not shy away from our tax liabilities. We pay corporation tax each year to the government to help them fund our society, which includes social and environmental issues. Many large companies shy away or try and be clever to avoid tax responsibilities, what these firms do is legal, but we feel not in the spirit of the law and avoiding paying these taxes is not good for our society or economy. A few of our direct competitors have failed to make a profit for years, therefore running at a loss, only being propped up by bankers and clever accounting. It's hard for us and the rest of the small surf industry to compete with these firms because of this. However, these firms are more than happy to spend a load of money to market heavily on their environmental work yet as they make a loss do not actively contribute back to society with any form of corporation tax. We don't think this is the right way to do business nor sustainable in the long term

Equal Opportunities

At the time of writing May 2024 Of the 20 or so staff who work for us half are female and of the 6 leadership positions half are held by females.

Returns and Repairs

As with all online shopping, returns are part of the process, we try as hard as we can to first minimise returns by providing the best possible photos and descriptions of the items we sell. This investment by us up front in models and real people writing descriptions hopefully helps remove uncertainty and the need to send things back. However, we get sometimes things just are not right, so we encourage all customers to use Royal Mail to return their goods. Royal Mail from what we can tell offers the most environmentally friendly service for parcels as it is not all about speed, therefore they can move a higher volume of parcels to the same location at once reducing the impact. We also check and reprocess all returns so they can be resold either as new or are sold through our store therefore we throw nothing away unlike many other large retailers where the financial cost of processing the return is not worth it so they just dispose of the product in a landfill.

Repair is a big part of trying to close the loop on the lifecycle of a product and we work with many brands on this. Especially on items such as wetsuits where we use a company called Bodyline in Newquay for all repairs, allowing customers to keep using their suits even after they have been damaged or started to wear out. Wetsuit and Neoprene disposal is very difficult to do properly and many options out on the market currently are more of a marketing greenwashing exercise than actually beneficial to the planet with many suits if they are unable to be cut up and used just thrown in landfill. We are working with C-Skins to enable customers to return a suit to us to be sent to a factory in Germany for the suit to be turned back into Carbon Black which is a crucial ingredient in all black rubber products including new wetsuits. This is how we believe we can close the loop on wetsuits and neoprene