Waypoints: The Green Compass — Summer 2025
7/1/2025
Stepping onto a sun-bleached track high in the Chiltern hills, I glanced at my digital watch: 31 °C on the last day of June, after the driest spring on local record. In southern Taiwan, that would pass for amiable, yet the air here felt brittle, and every stride raised a puff of chalk dust that should have stayed spring-soft. Climate change is no headline; it is the ground beneath our gardens, the hitch in every farmer’s irrigation plan and the quiet struggle of a backyard courgette. We cannot wish it away, but we can lighten its weight—composting every last peel, sharing resilient harvests, and keeping moisture-holding humus cycling back to the soil we borrow our supper from.
Zero-Waste Packaging: Borrowing from Nature, Returning to Nature
All year we’ve been wrestling with the question: how do you move goods around the world without smothering that world in plastic? The answer has taken months of late-night calls and spreadsheet juggling, because it isn’t half a dozen suppliers we must coax into line, but dozens—each with different factories, habits, and shipping rules. So we changed tack. Together with a supply-chain partner, we have set up our own zero-waste fulfilment centre.
Products now arrive there in bulk, stripped of individual plastic sleeves long before they reach your address. Inside the centre our team pick and pack using mainly unprocessed kraft paper in different forms:
- Unprocessed kraft paper—sometimes crumpled for gentle stuffing, sometimes folded into stout envelopes or sturdy cartons.
- Light draught paper bonded with plant starch, flexible enough to wrap awkward shapes yet home-compostable when its journey ends.
- A whisper of hemp string to brace heavier pieces where a parcel needs that extra hug of security.
And after that? No sticky tapes, no bubble puffs—just simple fibres borrowing from nature and returning to nature.
Because this new flow adds extra hands, dispatch will stretch from our usual one-to-two days to roughly three or four. I’ve weighed that delay against the mountain of plastic we refuse to create, and the balance is clear. We are also opening the fulfilment centre to other brands—if they wish to pack the same way, the doors are wide, whoever is interested can check with our supply chain partner. The more minds and parcels we steer through this loop, the faster the world shifts.
Walking the Summer Path Together
Heat will test us again before autumn rains arrive, but resilience grows through daily choices: peelings in the compost caddy, parcels that vanish back to soil, supper built on crops that thrive in a thirsty year. Thank you for your patience while we find the rhythm of this new system; every extra day in transit is time the planet is spared another layer of plastic armour.
If one of our new paper-wrapped parcels lands on your doorstep this season, let me know how it fares in your compost heap or council paper bin—I read every note. Until the next Waypoint, stay cool, stay hopeful, and keep nudging the world back into harmony—one peel, one parcel, one shimmering midsummer day at a time.