Echoing Green Earth

Dear Echoing Green Earth Community,

I wanted to take a moment to share with you what we've been doing behind the scenes at Echoing Green Earth. Transparency is one of our core values, and we believe in keeping our supporters fully informed about our journey—including the challenges we face.

Evolving Our Approach to Sustainable Products

When we first began, we had ambitious plans to build everything from scratch according to our strict sustainability standards. However, after looking deeply into the supply chain through the lens of our critical standards, we discovered a harsh reality: no supplier perfectly ticked all our boxes.

After months of conversations with various factories, we realized we needed to adapt our strategy. We decided to revisit our original vision of sustainable living. We started this journey with the aim of reducing our impact as humans on our Earth and reconnecting our relationship with mother nature. The biggest problem we set out to solve is the household waste problem - in particular plastic.

Having that in mind, we decided to change our strategy. Instead of developing every product ourselves—which takes tremendous time and resources—we're now focusing on:

Tapping into existing sustainable products that may not be widely accessible
Bringing attention to products made from 100% natural materials
Identifying sustainable materials that ensure product longevity

You'll see more of these thoughtfully selected items appearing in our e-shop in the coming weeks.

Addressing Real Supply Chain Challenges

While this approach isn't the ideal situation we initially envisioned, particularly since plastic packaging is still being used, we need to look at it from a system-wide angle. Instead of only looking at the plastics generated at the household, we need to shift our focus further up in the supply chain. This allows us to tackle a significant problem in traditional distribution: inventory waste.

To illustrate this, imagine you're buying online and ordering something from Amazon. In order for Amazon's seller to sell this very one item to you, a minimum-order-quantity policy is exercised across the entire supply chain—from factories to distributors, importers, wholesalers, and resellers. In short, thousands of this very product need to be produced.

The conventional supply chain creates a false demand curve. From factories to retailers, each channel member stocks inventory not because products necessarily satisfy real demand, but because products are produced to promote to users. This leads to waste—either disposed of by channel members or sold to consumers at rock-bottom prices for items they don't actually need. We're speaking of millions of products and enormous amounts of waste, all precious resources being wasted for nothing.

Our strategy? To involve the supplier's existing warehouse and distribution channel network. Instead of stocking up the inventory ourselves, we work with our suppliers to ship orders directly from their warehouses. But here come two challenges and compromises: plastic packaging and longer delivery time.

Plastic packaging

It was an incredibly difficult decision to accept plastic packaging and protective materials. However, during discussions and research, we learned that existing sustainable solutions like paper simply cannot withstand the rigors of long-distance transportation. Warehouses and logistics providers have strict standards requiring packaging that can endure various scenarios in their processes—which unfortunately still point to plastic-based solutions. When products arrive broken or damaged, consumers naturally return them, creating additional costs. Suppliers told us bluntly that they're unwilling to 'gamble with their profits' by experimenting with packaging that might not adequately protect items during shipping.

Longer delivery time

How fast a product can be delivered depends on the warehouse location. Warehouses in the UK and Europe typically result in a much shorter delivery time, but warehouses in Asia are a different story. While there are many platforms specializing in cross-border/cross-continent e-commerce that have developed whole systems to shorten the logistics times, the complexity involved in the import/export/custom/tax processes still makes the logistics time unbearable compared to the next day delivery from Amazon.

Small Steps Toward Big Change

We've chosen to prioritize bringing natural material products to market while seeking ways to influence the supply chain toward more sustainable packaging. We've spoken with over a hundred suppliers, and each time we reach out, we emphasize both packaging concerns and materials used in their products. It may be a small step, but at Echoing Green Earth, we believe every step counts.

While our current offering may not match the convenience of Amazon or meet all our sustainability goals, we're making deliberate trade-offs at this stage. With your support, we can gradually shift supplier mindsets, and hopefully soon you'll see more sustainably packaged products in our store. We promise to keep you updated on our progress.

Expanding Our Educational Efforts

In addition to our product offerings, we've begun experimenting with AI tools like NotebookLM to create podcasts. They're not perfect, but we enjoy listening to them and hope you will too. Creating these isn't as simple as giving AI a topic—we conduct research and carefully curate information to produce useful content.

We started the podcast because internally we're constantly learning and researching. Rather than letting this valuable information remain hidden, we want to share it with our community. After all, sustainable living is a continuous learning journey for all of us.

Thank you for being part of this journey. We welcome your feedback, questions, and ideas as we grow together.

Warmly,