How Beauchamp Foot Care Cuts Back on Plastic and Other Waste.

You may have seen quite a lot of news stories and documentaries in recent times about how plastic is damaging our environment. It’s something that everyone needs to take seriously, especially a responsible business like Beauchamp Foot Care.

No one can fail to be appalled by the sight of beaches covered in discarded plastic, animals injured and even dying from getting wrapped in packaging or swallowing it, not to mention the fact that this kind of waste is now being found in supermarket foods like fresh fish. That means we’re ingesting it too!

At Beauchamp Foot Care, we’ve been focused on green, eco-friendly practices for some time now and that includes finding ways to reduce the amount of plastic we create as waste. It’s not easy of course, but even small changes here and there can make a significant difference.

First of all, we adhere to what is called the waste hierarchy, which means that we look to re-use, re-purpose and recycle before we throw anything away that’s going to go to landfill. The good news is that our local council in Knightsbridge collects and recycles plastic bottles, containers, tubs and trays.

As a business, we have a legal responsibility to make sure that we recycle as much as possible where we can and we’re always looking for ways to improve how we do that.

Here are just a few of the things that we do:

• Small changes can help more than we all think. At Beauchamp Foot Care we tend to cut our nail files in half because we don’t really need to use a whole one – that means they go twice as far.
• Another thing we do is use several small, disposable buffers rather than one large one which can be more wasteful.
• We also try to avoid anything that is single use where we can, preferring to sterilise equipment properly in an autoclave and reuse it.
• We have stopped using plastic toe separators and now use tissue instead.
• We give patients re-usable flip-flops rather then disposable polystyrene ones which are more damaging to the environment.
• We constantly work with our suppliers to find ways of to cut down on packaging and things like paper invoices (one company we deal with used to send us as many as five separate invoices in one day all in separate envelopes).
• We try to buy in bulk whenever we can which also reduces the amount of plastic and other packaging.
• When we’re getting rid of older magazines in our clinic we take them to the local train station for others to read.
• We get involved in a variety of recycling projects, including one that re-purposes old clothes and we’ve had a long-standing policy of selling recycled Christmas tags in aid of St Christopher’s Hospice.

The truth is that we can all make a big difference by bringing in small changes when it comes to recycling plastic. Avoiding products with too much packaging and making sure that we restrict our use of single use plastic like shop-bought water is not that difficult.

At Beauchamp Foot Care in Knightsbridge, we are always reviewing our practices and working to keep our waste levels down as much as possible, particularly when it comes to plastic.