To make it very clear from the first line: this post is fairly off-track. Miles away from ethical fashion.
And yet – I cannot help it. What I stumbled over – half by accident, half pin pointed by friends of mine – merits being talked about. It illustrates so many things also of relevance when talking about sustainability in fashion: commitment, innovation, ‘can-do’ attitude, ‘where there is a will, there is a way’ – all of this, yet without forgetting that we humans love to enjoy and treat ourselves.
But let’s start at the beginning. A few days ago I made a day trip from Florence to Siena. Siena – a relatively small city in Tuscany, with an old town nearly unchanged, dating back to medieval times and since 1995 listed as UNESCO World Heritage Site. The city famously features a biannual horse race on the town’s medieval Piazza del Campo, which rather than a made up, historic-looking tourist attraction, is a traditional event close to the heart of the city’s inhabitants.
With the tourist office at the railway station closed despite a time schedule posted on the door saying the contrary, I was left to myself finding my way up to the old town, and subsequently enjoying getting lost in its street.
I had been rambling the street for some time, trying to find my way to this famous Piazza del Campo, when a slogan on the wall of a Gelateria (picture on the right), well visible from where I walked, caught my eye:
Curiously, I approached the place, and finally venture inside to have a close look – only to be taken by surprise by the next item I saw (left): A garbage bin neatly separating organic and paper/card board waste.
Where you would however normally have expect a third bin – for non-organic waste such as plastics – there was … nothing. Yep, correct, absolutely nothing.
This was intriguing, after all I was in Italy, a nation not exactly famous for its recycling achievements.
Only when I read the word ‘organic’ on their menu, a bell at the back of my head finally started ringing, and a recent recommendation of a Japanese friend of mind came to my mind: THIS was the Gelateria she had been talking about, the one with the organic ice cream which in her opinion was so good, that she’d only want to eat this and no other ice cream.
Truth be told: the ice cream was very, very good (my favourite among the 3 flavours I tasted: pear). But I’m completely going off-track here. What merits Grom (so the company’s name) a whole post in this blog, is their take on CSR – simple, yet determined, and considering the scale and ice cream consumption, with substantial impact. And here is concretely what they do:
- Spoons, cup linings, shopping bags, bin liners: Made from Mater-Bi, a biodegradable, compostable material created from corn starch and vegetable oil.
The spoons (right) are designed to be comfortable for right and left handed persons, and the thickness of them is such that they comply with EU standards for composting. - Cups, napkins, brochures, receipt prints, business cards etc: The paper stems from Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified resources.
The cups specifically are lined with Mater-Bi, and as a whole biodegradable and compostable. - Mura Mura organic fruit farm: Grom owns a 10 hectare farm at the outskirts of the piemontese town of Costigliole d’Asti. There they grow their own organic pears, figs, apricots, melons, strawberries, peaches as well as a number of other fruits (e.g. apples) on an experimental basis. All of these fruits obviously are then made into ice cream.
They also keep bees, which are of course needed to for their pollination work. - Ice cream containers and spoons in the shop: All made of typical kitchen chrome. No plastics, no PVC. Not one of the containers on sight was made from anything non-reusable or else non-compostable/recyclable.
- Price: Importantly, despite all the efforts mentioned up to here, Grom sells their ice cream at exactly the same price as competition up and down the street and the town (which were fairly standardised as it seemed: 2.50 Euros for the smallest size, 3 Euros for the midium size, 3.50 Euros for the large size, and 4 or 4.50 Europs for extra large size). No ‘organic mark-up’ whatsoever.
Bottom line: Grom gives us a good example for a number of things that in essence equally apply to ethical fashion businesses.
1) Yes, it is possible to survive in a heavily competitive consumer market, selling and producing ethically, respecting the environment, at no extra cost for the consumer.
2) Commitment to find alternative solution to widely-accepted, but equally widely known ‘suboptimal’ solutions, is a must.
3) Transparency is a given. Do a good job, be open about what you do. Answer questions. Do good and talk about it. But do it without finger-pointing.
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Grom in Siena: Via Banchi di Sopra, 11/13. Opening hours.
For other Grom shops in Italy and across the globe, see this list.
