In our first year of trading it has became apparent to us that going green was and still is the way forward. As you can imagine we do quite a large number of miles collecting and dropping off our customers ironing and the impact we have on the environment was and still is a concern to us. This caused us to take our first leap towards being greener by converting to environmentally friendly biodiesel to power our van.
Biodiesel
At first our concern was that it was going to be a very expensive exercise having the van converted to use the new fuel, but fortunately we were pleasantly surprised when being informed that no mechanical changes were necessary to the van in order to use biodiesel. All we had to do was undo the fuel cap and fill up. The next exercise was to find a supplier of the greener biodiesel, a quick check on Google revealed a company by the name of
EnFuels in Thatcham. I popped down for a chat and as they say, the rest is history.
We initially trialled
EnFuels’s biodiesel for a month by running a mixture of ½ biodiesel and ½ normal diesel to see how our van would perform and if it would have any adverse effects. To cut a long story short, at the end of the month we reviewed our results and found that there were no problems running the van on the 50/50 mixture.
After the successful months trial we took the decision that the van was ready to run on 100% biodiesel. Joe at EnFuels was very helpful throughout this whole process and explained that after 3 full tanks of biodiesel the van would need to have its fuel filter changed due to biodiesel being a better solvent than normal diesel. I thought, here we go this is the expensive part, but guess what; £20.00 is all it cost to change the filter! All I did was take the van down to our friendly local garage (Chris Fidler) one Saturday morning and 30 minutes later I was back on the road.
Listening to our customers
After the initial success with the going green campaign we decided to investigate what other changes could be put in place to continue our ongoing efforts with remaining environmentally friendly.
Taking on customers concerns about the polythene garment covers not being biodegradable or environmentally friendly we are now in the process of changing to a biodegradable environmentally friendly garment cover!
Watch this space.
Hangers
We would also like to encourage all of our customers to reuse all metal hangers by popping them into your next lot of ironing. Alternatively if you would prefer to use your own hangers, just pop them into the bag and we will use them instead.