A Little Pillow Company

We are a home-based business so home choices are equally work choices, overlapping in everything from cleaning to the environmental projects we are committed to. So when I use "we" below, that automatically includes A Little Pillow Company. And we wouldn't have it any other way. We hope to be able to use our company to promote the values we are passionate about: wildlife conservation, land rehabilitation/restoration, low-impact/zero-waste packaging and buying local. The following is a list of some of the ways we support these values: 1) Working from home means we have no commute. That's taking 2 people off the roads daily. We further minimize our travel carbon-footprint by combing work and personal trips and putting those trips on a schedule. 2) Have put 4 acres of our land into the USDA Quail Habitat Restoration program, taking those 4 acres from a fescue-monocultured hay field and reseeding it into native grasses and flowers 3) We have taken 15 of our 20 total acres and dedicated them as an ark through the We Are an Ark program (wearetheark.org) by Mary Reynolds which seeks to protect wildness and native species. You can see our property on their website map. Wildlife conservation and land rehabilitation are our two biggest passions which we hope to promote through our business as well. 4) We raise our own food using a pesticide-free no-dig method 5) We compost all of our scraps and much of our business paper waste. 6) Both our house and home-based business is heated and cooled FIRST by passive means (we have double-glazed windows and doors). We can get by with opening our windows for most of the year and in the winter keep the house between 58 - 63 deg. When cold we wear more clothes in the workspace. A few acres of our land is in woods and we use that for firing our woodstove for a few hours each day when really cold. 7) We use energy efficient lighting (LEDs) when necessary but mostly getting away with natural light. Our appliances are mostly Energy Star rated too. Our business challenge right now remain packaging! Since we are an e-commerce business, plastic film packaging seems to be a requirement. I do have a plan to at least start offering a zero-waste packaging option for our website customers anyway starting in January of 2020 using compostable paperboard and non-reinforced paper tape. There is a local non-profit organization dedicated to zero-waste and we have contacted them for some advice as well. (Sadly Amazon is another story. They won't allow anything but plastic wrapped everything, but our ultimate goal is to wean off of them fully anyway) Our business waste is comprised of plastic film, cardboard, plastic burlap, fabric scraps, a small amount of waste paper and some escaping fiber fill. Here is how we address those: 1) Plastic film - All of the bags we use right now to ship our pillows are the #2 recyclable polyethylene. Any returns we get, or bags that have been damaged, are recycled at our local grocery store 2) Cardboard - most is used on our garden either for making new beds or straight up composting. Any overflow gets recycled at our local facility 3) Plastic burlap - Our bales of fiber some wrapped in this stuff and so far, I've not found any great solution for it...... 4) Escaping fiber fill - What falls on the floor during our hand-stuffing process is what I'm talking about. I'm looking into upcycling it or finding ways of sequestering it. Although it has shown remarkable properties that may be useful in soil amendment so I'm looking into getting a grant to study the environmental impact of that possibility! 5) The fabric scraps we generate from the cutting out of our pillows we are looking to upcycle, or offer as giveaways to non-profit organizations for crafting and quilting projects or compost. I have also been experimenting with composting cotton to use around our tree plantings.