Equus Health

Equus Health gets greener

- leading the way again.

Tubs and buckets have their uses, but just how many does your yard need? Like us no doubt you end up using them for every conceivable storage container around your home; then what? We all tend to chuck them away! This adds to the ever increasing 'plastic mountain' filling up our landfill sites!

In the beginning, many years ago now, Equus Health led the way into refills/bagged products, trying to reduce the amount of waste packaging associated with our industry. Other equine supplement companies followed over the years. They say copying is the best form of 'flattery' don't they? well, if it means more of us consider using less packaging , all well and good!

Whether we like to admit it or not, our world is taking a 'hammering' and we at Equus Health firmly believe if we all take a little responsibility for our environment and its future, we can help slow down the damage us humans are doing to our planet.

On a personal level many of us try to recycle our household waste, use lower energy around the home, or use reusable shopping bags; it all helps. We are being made aware on almost a daily basis, things which are speeding up the damage process to our precious environment and one of the main areas still is an excess of quite often, unnecessary packaging

So from 2008, Equus Health is going further setting the example, hoping that others will follow within the Equine supplements market as happened with our bags originally.

New for 2008 - Biodegradable bags
As a forward thinking company we wish to take some responsibility for our future environment, by changing to using some recycled materials and more eco friendly ­ biodegradable packaging. We are proud to announce that we have sourced some excellent Bags that for all intense and purposes are very similar to those we already use for our 'own sourced' bagged straight herbs etc. However these new ones are 100% biodegradable and will quickly decompose in our landfill sites, unlike many plastic bags which hang around for decades, thus filling up our waste areas very fast.

Extensive use of recycled paper
In addition to this we are in the process of moving to entirely recycled paper for our promotional product and homeopathy leaflets available to everyone of you who wants them, alongside our trade price lists which are just for our retailers. You will notice how high quality the leaflets are, and just by increasing the size of the print run, very little change to the cost price, so its not even costing us that much more! HQ now uses entirely recycled paper in the office and we all recycle cardboard boxes... until they fall apart!

Do your horse a favour and do the environment no harm at the same time!
To 'flag up' our going greener policy, we are launching 'Favours' a completely natural and eco friendly Horse treat, packaging based on a wedding favours theme which happens to be in a biodegradable bag and tied with biodegradable ribbon, finished off with recycled paper tag! Help us to support the going greener issue by buying him a favour, not just for your horse, but for the environment too. If our treats sell as well as we hope they should (our 'herbal junky testers' love them!) We would like to be able to give something back to an Equine charity. For every bag sold a donation given to support equines in need What do you think? If you read this and feel we should, please email us with your support and a suggestion of a suitable charity, an email only takes a few mins. In Sept 08 we will have had Favours on the market for six months, people should know them by them and be buying them regularly .At this point (if they are selling well enough to be worth it) we would like to consider donating to the charity of you our customers choice!

Other projects in the pipeline
We envisage getting greener and greener! There are other packaging issues we want to tackle in the long term, and will be running pilot schemes in certain areas of 'trial packaging' This packaging for some of our nutraceutical products, currently in 'very expensive and very plastic' containers, will be aimed at being more eco friendly, but it has to meet with your approval too!

Watch out for our packaging trials and let us know what you think; an email only takes a min or two!

Scoops and containers
You are always asking for scoops! why! Surely a spoon will do?

We have plastic buckets/pots and scoops all over the place on our yards, most of which is excess packaging and some has very little reuse value. So much of it is binned without being used more than once!

What do you think to offering tubs and scoops to purchase separately to the product, as and when you need it?

Please help us to start considering the environment; email us with your thoughts and suggestions, it only takes a min or two!