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Well, for starters, these concerns are nothing new for us. Having grown up in small rural communities, we’ve always been conscious of the world beyond our cities, how its health nurtures our own, and how what we do every day has an effect on it. Part of the motivation for starting up Under The Weather in the first place was a desire to contribute in some way to the sustainable bicycle messenger industry (even the name is partly a nod to the fact that we’re all affected by our climate). We work hard to provide durable bags that last professional messengers a couple of years of heavy every day usage (many years of light-duty commuter work), and won’t be tossed in a landfill after a few months.

In our workshop, we use as many of our cutting scraps as possible, sewing them into “new” pieces of fabric to make bags or banners if they can’t be used for any of our smaller items, which is why you’ll sometimes see those whacky patchy-lookin’ bags for sale. Instead of throwing away a bag piece that has a mistake, we either take it apart to redo it, or (if that’s not practical) we cut it up into the largest possible reusable pieces and make something else with it. Our liner scraps are used to make pouches, pocket liners, and those (not-so-secret) seam pockets. As a result, we end up throwing away only the smallest, most ratty & useless bits of materials. We use compact fluorescent bulbs for lighting wherever possible, always turning them off when we leave, and block off heating/cooling to our workshop whenever it’s not in use.

Recently, we have been delighted to switch from the previous industry standard material Poly Vinyl Chloride (PVC) to Thermoplastic Poly Urethane (TPU) for our liners. Because of its significantly higher price and lesser availability, this represents a significant investment for us, and a risk in having to raise our prices. However, we have never been comfortable using PVC because of its health and environmental cost, and felt that it was something we just had to do. We worked hard and long to source TPU with cold tolerance equal to PVC (most TPU has a higher cold-crack temperature), and better performance in other characteristics.

In our office, we print on recycled/FSC paper, and reuse it by printing on both sides or cutting it up into notepaper if it can’t be printed on again. We reuse packing materials as much as possible, which is why our customers are treated to a wide variety of interesting boxes and other packaging. In the interest of expediency, we do ship by plane sometimes (starting this year we buy gold-standard carbon-offsets from Planetair.ca for our overseas shipments), but most of our continental shipments are by ground, delivered to the shipping depot by foot or bicycle rather than being picked up (except for very large orders – and that’ll change when we get a cargo bike!), and we always pack to avoid excess weight and volume. Personally, we haven’t traveled by plane for several years (and now buy gold-standard carbon-offsets when we do); travel long distances by train or bus when possible, and by small rented car (we don’t own a car) when public transit isn’t possible. Of course, within the city we travel by bike, foot, or public transit (taxi on rare occasions). We keep our energy up by drinking tap water out of mugs or non-disposable water bottles, and brew our own coffee and tea instead of going to you-know-who.

Now we’re not saying we’re perfect; sometimes we don’t make lunch and end up with a nasty (non-recyclable) polystyrene take-out package full of non-organic fast food, or get too rushed and have to buy some virgin forest paper supplies from the corner store, or a double-double from Tim’s. But on the whole, we work pretty hard to make sure that our little manufacturing operation has as little negative impact on the world around us as possible. It’s impossible to create zero waste and use zero energy as long as you’re alive (even sitting meditating you’re burning calories and expelling carbon dioxide), but we believe we all have a responsibility to live and work with consciousness of the effect we are having, so we’re trying to do our best.