Environmental Policy

Mission Statement

The Styling Bank is an online modern costume hire house for commercial stills, short form, film and television based in north London, UK.

We recognise the need for change within not just the wardrobe department in the media industries but also the fashion industry as a whole due to environmentally damaging production of raw materials, unfairly paid workers in manufacture, poor supply chain credentials and wasteful returns processes that often end in landfill. 

Our Impacts

The Styling Bank is committed to helping deliver an environmentally sustainable media production industry. We seek to better understand and manage our impact by implementing initiatives to act on our opportunity to make a meaningful difference. 

The Styling Bank aims to help reduce the reliance on new purchases and the impact of fast fashion, by instead working towards creating a circular economy through re-using and recycling post-shoot stock, decreasing new purchases and diverting clothes from potentially going to landfills by making them easily available for hire and reuse instead. 

Increasing garment lifetimes is one of the most effective means of reducing their environmental footprint, extending the life of clothing by an extra 9 months could reduce carbon, waste and water footprints by around 20-30% per garment. 

By offering an easily accessible alternative to fast fashion purchases by using hired items instead, The Styling Bank provides a useful resource, adding to what is currently available and aims to help contribute to and change methods of wardrobe sourcing across the media industry which can collectively have an impact on the amount of waste produced by the wardrobe department as a whole.

We offer the ability to host other stylists’ stock, which will facilitate the sourcing of wardrobe local to your area which will help to cut down on travel, increase the variety of stock available and create a community network of stylists working together to combat costume waste, thereby also increasing the awareness of more environmentally sustainable practices.

Our Actions

As a small business, we are committed to keeping our environmental impact low and are continually evaluating and improving our environmental impact and performance as an integral part of the business strategy and operations. These will be reviewed every 6 months. 

The Styling Bank director Alice Norris (Timms) will be responsible for ensuring that this environmental policy will be implemented and future suppliers or stockists who join the Styling Bank will be encouraged to comply with the terms of the styling bank environmental policy as a requirement to them joining and being hosted by The Styling Bank. We will also encourage sustainability training and aim to offer and develop more tailored department crew-specific training options and relevant information.

Aims

We will endeavour to continually assess and improve the running operations of the styling bank to reduce any environmental impacts of transport, storage, waste and operational management that negatively impact the environment.

We will consider the potential environmental impact when making business decisions. We will put sustainability questions to all suppliers before contracting with them to ensure that they meet our environmental needs. This also includes considering the future environmental impact of the post-life of garments after we are no longer able to use them, by ensuring that any non-re-useable wardrobe stock is re-purposed responsibly post the styling bank lifespan, through resale or appropriate textile recycling organisations, ensuring there is a zero-to-landfill policy in place across all operations.

We use Guppy friend sacks to minimise micro-plastic waste when laundering garments, environmentally friendly cleaners, use minimal water and air dry whenever possible.

We use good quality re-useable bags for packing and transporting the garments to reduce any packaging waste.

We will continually evaluate the environmental impact of any new products we need, favouring environmentally friendly and energy-efficient products where ever possible, and assess if the need for plastic items can be delivered in another way. We will reuse, recycle and repurpose everything that we are able to.

Hireable Stock has all been photographed and is available to view online reducing the need to travel to view the stock, and making it easy to add to mood boards. Where garments need to be viewed this can also be done via video calling consultation to reduce transport if suitable.

We restrict travel or find alternative less polluting options whenever possible and we aim to transport the hired garments with electric-powered couriers whenever possible to reduce CO2 emissions and are working towards the best available options for this in our area.

We use offsetting schemes for unavoidable elements of our carbon footprint such as Mossy Earth.

The wardrobe stock is stored in a multi-unit safe store storage facility and run from a local home office which are both powered by renewable energy sources, and we will seek to reduce the amount of energy used whenever possible, turning off lights and electrical equipment when not needed.

Goals

To expand the business by providing an easily accessible directory of useful sustainable suppliers, resources, tips and information for stylists to help reduce the wardrobe departments’ environmental impact, creating a community, sharing knowledge and collectively changing attitudes and negative environmental work policies within the industry and beyond.

 We will work with clients to improve environmental performance and practice by sharing knowledge and our learning to encourage positive change.

Another goal is to expand the current facilities on offer and develop more opportunities for stylists to access and hire clothing and props to reuse and further reduce the need to purchase new ones, by developing relationships with brands and forging partnerships.

We aim to continually research better practices and allow the company to grow with better environmental performance and to increase The Styling Banks environmental awareness and future employees’ and staff awareness through research and training.