Tevi success story as Packshare v2.0 website launches UK wide

Fantastic business and Growth Hub alumni Packshare are set to unveil their brand new, EU funded website in April, helping businesses all over the country share and reuse mailorder packaging.

Packshare has been helping businesses to reuse their communities’ waste packaging since 2018, first in Cornwall and now, with help from University of Exeter’s Tevi, UK wide.

Tevi is an EU funded initiative which provides small and medium-sized enterprises across Cornwall with expert consultation, opportunities for recognition and certification, and grant funding. Packshare were amongst the first businesses to put in a funding bid, pitching to overhaul their website, adding features like a members map, integrated business profiles, and crucially improving the look and feel to make searching for businesses as accessible and user-friendly as possible.

Tevi believe that Packshare’s vision aligns with their own remit to promote economic and environmental growth in Cornwall, and have funded the improvements which are now available to preview at www.packshare.org ahead of their official launch on April 6th.

Packshare co-founder Louisa Street was originally inspired to create the website when packing deliveries for a Falmouth business led her to seek out ways to keep packaging in circulation. She knew that the packaging was reusable – many businesses already reuse their own incoming packaging for outgoing deliveries – but not every recipient needs the packaging that they have. So how could she make connections between people who had packaging that they didn’t want, and businesses who could reuse it?

The answer was Packshare.org, a database of UK businesses, searchable by location and what packaging they can use.

Now in their second year, Packshare has over 100 registered businesses all around the UK, and hope that their vastly improved website will help them achieve 500 signups by the end of 2020.

Co-founder Roo Pescod says “We’ve got huge ambitions for Packshare. I’ve said from the start that we want to be bigger than Twitter in 5 years. Really there’s no reason that every small business in the UK shouldn’t sign up. Just about every business either buys in or throws away packaging, and we’ve found that those businesses can be next door to each other. One business throws away bubblewrap, and next door buys it in. We’re seeing it again and again and it makes much more sense to share. It’s good for the environment, it’s good for small businesses, and it’s good for local communities to be working together.”

Packshare is free to use and is run entirely on donations. Roo continues “It’s been a lot of work to get the site up and running, and to promote it to businesses. We’ve had a lot of help from zero waste and plastic free groups online sharing the message. People know that we’ve got to find better solutions to problems like waste management. Recycling isn’t enough anymore, and it’s a waste of time, money and resources to ship used packaging abroad when businesses in our local communities can reuse it.”

Read more about their Growth Hub journey here.