How Green Is Hicat®...

We’ve added in the notes below to our FAQs page to help customers understand where we sit with regards to eco friendliness & looking out for the planet.

We like to think that we are doing our bit as we do use environmentally friendly materials in the creation of our products where we can apart from the bits where we don’t have an option - for instance spraying the lacquered parts of our Scraaatch™ pieces noting that we did a product update in 2018 to limit sprayed parts in favour of painting.

We also use sustainable products where we can like our coir carpet, which is made from the husks of coconut waste - where we don’t have a choice or control on the sustainability of materials like cardboard packaging, laminated cardboard tubes, MDF & twist pile carpet we are pleased to report that the manufacturers of these materials do have green friendly policies in place.

We are very hot on recycling & limit waste by using offcuts of MDF & laminate tubes for packaging & even have products that have specifically been designed from carpet & tube offcuts that would have otherwise ended up in the bin - our Catapilla™ range is the best example of this as it was a green project to use the short sections that were redundant after cutting down our 300cm tubes for made-to-measure units & this in turn sparked off OOAK pieces like our Cat Cabana, Scratching Deck & Cat Nap Beds™ & although much smaller in scale our Thingy & Stick Thingy were also created from felt & twist pile carpet waste.

Another practice that we introduced a couple of years ago was to give away carpet off cuts to customers that we can’t make up into a OOAK or bespoke piece - the most common example of this are the long narrow end cuts that are offered as Up For Grabs pieces that can be used to make a version of our DIY Polecat, bridges or shelves.

Our most recent green initiative was to switch our local central London van deliveries to bicycle deliveries - we’re also pleased to say that we’ve always cycled to our studio from home, & back again, stopping at red lights :).

Catapilla™, Scraaatch™ & Cat Wall™ products are now sent out in recycled cardboard boxes instead of plastic so it’s just our install kits that get sent out in plastic bags - we are still wrestling with how we do away with the black plastic wrapping that our made-to-measure units are packaged in but this is not an easy one to sort as we’ve struggled to find a suitable replacement.

In terms of energy consumption the first thing we did when we moved into our SE1 studio in 2017 was to change all of the halogen lamps to LED - we also don’t have any heating installed as the central heating system pipes for the building run through the ceiling in our studio from the adjacent boiler room so we are toasty by default during winter when the heating is turned on.

We did try to work out if we were carbon neutral but started to get a headache calculating what was what in terms of our direct vs. indirect consumption, whether the utilities supplied by our landlord are renewable or not & how exactly you measure your business wide footprint so gave up but think we are a size 4 as opposed to 15 plates.