Sustainability Initiatives

 

Carbon Negative

Neighbourhood Botanicals was one of the first Carbon Negative beauty brands, offsetting 2x the amount of carbon we emit to get your products made and shipped to you.

Climate change is the biggest issue affecting our planet right now, and will be for some time. Companies cannot stand by any longer and take profits without contributing back. We believe a global change towards conscious capitalism is well overdue. 
By becoming carbon negative / climate positive, we are going beyond 'climate-neutral'. We are a very small company, and we keep environmental and sustainability considerations in mind at every stage of our business practices, so we already started with a very low footprint. 
You can read more about the process on our CARBON NEGATIVE page.

 

Sustainable Packaging

We offer biodegradable refills on our bestsellers! Micaela (our founder) designed this packaging herself and set up a whole other company to let other beauty brands use it too.

After you've finished your product, please either refill or recycle your bottle so we can create a true circular economy. Full info on recycling can be found on our RECYCLING page.

Our Face Off, The Body Oil and Acid Washed bottles are made from 100% post-consumer waste plastic. That means plastic sourced from your kerbside collections.
Our face oils, and our lube are housed in glass bottles.
Sunday Morning Dry Shampoo, Hand Model, Dear Diary, and all the Life Merch body care products are all in aluminium or tin.

We weigh up many factors when choosing the packaging for our products. When new discoveries or packaging options come to light, we have updated the packaging. We've already done this with Sunday Morning (used to be plastic), and Face Off and the The Body (used to be virgin PET).

 

Vegan and Cruelty-Free

We have always been cruelty-free and vegan, but we are working through the long and costly process of becoming officially certified with the corresponding bodies, so we can show those stamps on our packages and provide greater trust and transparency to our customers. You can read more on our VEGAN CRUELTY FREE page.

  • Our products are all vegan.
    We can confirm that none of our products contain ingredients of animal origin.
  • Our products are all cruelty-free.
    We do not test any of our products on animals. Our products are not tested on animals on our behalf by any third party. We do not sell anywhere that requires the testing of products on animals, and we pledge never to do so, no matter the financial gains.

Even though the UK has now left the EU, Neighbourhood Botanicals continues to abide by the EU Regulation (EC) N° 1223/2009 on cosmetic products which is the strictest in the world. This is both because we believe in doing things properly, and also because the EU accounts for a large share of our market.

 

Behind The Scenes

  • Our postal packaging, whilst super cute, is plastic free and mostly from recycled paper.
  • Even our trade orders go out without any plastic voidfill and in reused boxes and packaging, with paper document wallets.
  • Some of our vendors require products housed in polybags - so we sourced biodegradable ones.
  • Some require air pillows - so we bought a machine to make compostable ones.
  • We don't buy any single-use plastic in our lab, and we reuse any bubble wrap and packaging that comes to us.
  • Plastic gloves are required for hygiene purposes, but we managed to find biodegradable ones.
  • Our coffee machine uses paper filters, not pods.
  • We use a production iPad instead of printed production sheets.
  • Our office paper is 100% recycled.
  • Our rubbish bags are potato starch.

 

Beyond Our Business

We are a certified Living Wage Employer.

A percentage of our profits each month goes towards charitable endeavours, made possible because of your custom.

We help to provide crowd-sourced loans for entrepreneurs in developing nations with Lend With Care. You can join up with them and do the same too! It's such a worthy 'charity-non-charity'. See our loans HERE.

Through lockdown we partnered with our local St Mungo's homeless shelter to provide them with refillable quality botanical shower products to give their boarders a little bit of self-care luxury. 

Our main ingredients suppliers are a lovely family run UK based supplier, who source their ingredients direct from farms around the UK, Europe and across the world.