Environmental Responsibility and Sustainability

Our Mission

Our mission at Bigjigs Toys is to deliver quality, safe, and affordable products that are responsibly sourced.

This is achieved and maintained through:

• Designing products in the UK
• Using high-quality, responsibly sourced materials
• Using trusted ethical production facilities
• Working with our suppliers in a fair and ethical way

We’ve always taken care to make sure our products are responsibly sourced, and our Director, Liz, often visits the factories where our toys are produced to ensure all acceptable standards are being upheld. 

Sustainable Toys

We’ve made some BIG changes to be more sustainable in the last few years! When choosing wood for our products, we carefully assess the quality and durability to guarantee many years of play.  

A lot of our wooden toys are made from sustainably sourced rubberwood. Rubberwood is a byproduct of latex production and recycling this wood means we're helping reduce waste.

In the design studio, our designers like to think outside the (toy) box to reduce plastic parts and components and make our toys more sustainable. We want our toys to stand the test of time, and manufacturing from wood gives the next generation the full value of a wonderful resource. 

We have very little plastic in our product or packaging; our designers are tasked at using plastic as the absolute last resort. If we can produce a component as strong as we need it in another material, we will. If we can creatively engineer cardboard to protect a product we will always use it. Dealing with both product and packaging sympathetically enables us to be creative with our ideas and keep the use of plastic to an absolute minimum.

Our Eco-Friendly Toys

We’re proud to stock two incredible ranges of sustainable toys, Green Toys and FSC® Certified Toys.

Green Toys

Like their name suggests, Green Toys are green by both name and nature. Green Toys are manufactured in California, USA and are made from 100% recycled plastic milk jugs! Their food-safe single material means they’re easy to recycle when children have outgrown them and won’t go to landfill. Read more about Green Toys here.

100% FSC® Certified Toys

Our FSC® Certified Toys are made from responsibly sourced materials. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC® Certified) promotes responsible forestry and its international forest certificate system allows both consumers and businesses to know that their wood has been ethically harvested. Bigjigs Toys are FSC® Certified with FSC® C147826. You can read more about the FSC® here.

Sustainable Packaging

Over 80% of the Bigjigs Toys range uses packaging that’s made from 95% recycled cardboard and is printed with soy inks. Our main aim is to avoid overpackaging but still protect every product we sell. Whilst our use of plastic in internal packaging is minimal, we continue to make every effort to reduce that in favour of paper and cardboard inserts.

Bigjigs Toys Environmental Statement

By making correct choices in our purchasing chain, we feel that we can make a positive contribution towards sustainability. Whilst we are a substantial importer of finished product into the UK, we make considered decisions to purchase day to day supplies locally. We give preference to local suppliers who share our sustainability credentials.

Operations

Throughout our day to day operations, the team makes an effort to reduce our impact. 

• No direct parcel packaging is purchased - we regularly reuse boxes or buy recycled cardboard to send out orders. 
• Zero polythene - you won’t find any polythene in our parcels. In fact, when you receive an order from us, all of the packaging can go in your recycling ( so long as it’s split into material content firstly)
• Two 1,200 litre recycling bins - our appointed waste management team, Biffa, work with us to have our recycling picked up weekly. Biffa collects four times as much landfill waste from us on their weekly collections.
• 99% of our invoices and statements are emailed - paper is only ever used when a customer is unable to accept emails
• Keeping air freight to a minimum - only using air cargo where necessary
• Reducing and reusing packaging - all surplus cardboard that cannot be used for order packing is recycled and collected weekly by MP Waste Management

Offices 

We’ve also done our best to ensure our offices are as environmentally friendly as possible.

• Power-saving features - all staff computers have power-saving features and are automatically switched off when not in use
• LED lighting - we use LED lighting throughout our warehouse, offices and showroom areas. LED lights use up to 90% less power than incandescent bulbs yet provide a greater light level
• Solar power - all of our electricity is produced via the 216 solar panels on our roof. Bigjigs Toys’ warehouse roofs have the perfect tilt and aspect for generating solar energy. 
• Batteries, printer toners & cartridges - these are all regularly recycled
• No diesel company cars - our company cars are now petrol and electric 

The Bigjigs Solar Project

In December 2011, a 50 kwp/348m square solar generation system was installed on the warehouse roof. This sit-on system should offset 2239 tonnes of carbon dioxide in its 25 year lifetime. The system is cleaned every year to ensure efficiency. We harvest more energy than we use and the extra energy is returned to the National Grid. 

We’re always looking for more ways to reduce our impact and work more sustainably.