November 2025
Through positive engagement with an external supplier, the University of Salford Art Collection team has prompted a manufacturing change which will result in a significant reduction of single plastic use nationally – over 16,500 small plastic bags a year!
As part of the Green Impact programme at the University of Salford, ran by the Sustainability team, Art Collection Curator Stephanie reached out to a number of regular suppliers to enquire about more sustainable products and solutions.
One company – Absolute Products (a leader in providing high quality museum and gallery supplies) went the extra mile, researching and changing a manufacturing process to swap small single-use plastic bags for paper-based, biodegradable alternatives.
Head of Sales and Marketing Jade Stentiford explains:
Evolving our packaging to improve our sustainability has been important to us for some time now. We use carefully sourced cardboard boxes, designed specifically for our products to reduce wastage, pack with biodegradable loose fill packing peanuts, and when designing bespoke packaging for special projects such as travelling exhibitions, always work with durable, non-plastic materials whenever possible.
That said, one glaring hole in our efforts lay in our packaging for our smaller items. The bags we were using for our hangers and hanging accessories were the single use plastic variety. When the team at the University of Salford pointed this out to us, we welcomed the nudge to get on and sort that issue out next.
We spent some time researching options, as we wanted to find an option that hit as many positive factors as possible, from the locality of sourcing to the sustainability standards of the packaging itself. In the end we landed on Glassine packaging bags from a company called eco-craft. They are plastic free, biodegradable, compostable, recyclable paper, that are made in the UK and are vegan friendly.
“In the 12 months preceding the switch, we had ordered 16,500 units of the old-style packaging, meaning the switch will be saving the use of a minimum of 16,500 small plastic packaging bags per year from now onwards.”
Looking forward, our next focus area that we are currently researching is replacing the lay flat plastic we currently package our long (2.5m) track products in, with a sustainable tissue-based alternative – watch this space!
We are grateful to the team at Salford for flagging their concern with us and pleased to report such a positive outcome from a simple feedback email. Hopefully, this will encourage others to speak up when ordering elsewhere, too – you can make a difference so easily.
