Sustainability and Ethics Statement
Nauticalia has been trading for more than 50 years, and in that time has always been conscious of its responsibilities towards its workforce, suppliers, customers and the wider environmental and social aspects of our day-to-day business practices.
This has become more focused in recent times as the population becomes more conscious of itself and its direct effect on the planet and its inhabitants, climate, infrastructure, and resources.
We strive to:
- Create a safe and pleasant work environment for our staff.
- Ensure our supply chain contains suppliers and contractors who work to acceptable levels of labour standards including the exclusion of modern slavery and the use of child labour. Our supplier’s workforce should be treated with respect, paid at internationally acceptable levels for the area, and treated to internationally acceptable workplace standards including the requirements for breaks, holidays and the provision of a safe working environment.
- Minimise our impact on the environment across our product ranges, packaging and transport. This includes an awareness of the materials that make up our products and an assessment of their impact on the environment both during use and the ultimate disposal of those products and packaging. Also, an awareness of the source of that material and its sustainability - an example being the source of timber for wooden products. Where possible we will avoid using products that are not considered ‘environmentally friendly’ such as plastics
- Make sure our products and associated packaging are safe and made to internationally designated standards, such as CE testing.
We are currently:
- Pursuing an active campaign to reduce the amount of plastic based packaging around our products. One specific area is the replacement of polystyrene as a protective material for delicate products with more sustainable/recyclable materials, but that must provide the same level of protection. This is challenging but we have recently (2025) achieved it with one of our main suppliers and the lessons learnt will benefit us in rolling this out across our other factories.
- Updating our records of factories Ethics and Social Compliance standings and maintaining copies of certification from internationally accepted bodies such as SEDEX. This is to ensure we have as much visibility on our, often, remote, factories where constant ‘on the ground’ interaction is not practically feasible. Many of our factories are located in distant places such as China and India. Occasional factory visits is however a goal both for development of products but also familarisation with the factory’s environmental, social and ethical practices.
- Updating records for compliance to the new GPSR requirements for selling products to the European Union. This is an ongoing process as new products come on stream. All our products are now labelled with an Authorised European representative who themselves hold our technical records and copies of certification such as CE.
- Constantly reviewing our waste output from office, shops and warehousing. We have recently (2024) introduced separate waste bins (internally) and skips (externally) to allow more recycling of paper, card, plastics, glass, metal.
- Our waste cardboard is baled on-site then collected by a recycling company who issue a rebate against the weight.
- We are in the process (2025) of collecting old metal from our sites – office, yard and warehouse and arranging collection for recycling, once again for a rebate against weight and type of material. This includes the removal and recycling of old shipping containers which were unusable due to water ingress and becoming unsightly withing our local environment.
- Investigating the use of alternative packing material within our warehouse such as paper-based carton tapes instead of plastic packing tape
- We have an air-pillow machine to create “bubblewrap” but using recycled, and recyclable, materials.
- We have installed low energy bulbs and sensor-based lighting across the whole warehouse and offices. Thus reducing cost and the environmental impact of the energy requirement.
- We reuse packing cartons where possible.