Charter of Principles

If you’d like to participate in the community we are building, we ask that your organisation or business agrees to respect and uphold the values which we believe to be essential to our shared prosperity, health and happiness. These values are incorporated in this document, our Charter of Principles, and your membership is conditional on full acceptance of these.

At the core of our beliefs is the concept of sustainability, ensuring that the total impact of the business on the local, social and global environment causes no lasting or long term damage, and does not degrade resources or deplete them significantly faster than they can be replaced.

We see the Earth as an intricately complex interconnected system, and consequently our actions can have effects not only on our immediate surroundings, but also on regional, national and international ecologies and economies.

So, we ask that you share the following principles and practices, and that you can demonstrate how your particular line of work or interest embodies some or all of these principles.  We understand that it can be hard to put all of these ideas into practice, and we don’t yet live in a world where they are commonly accepted business practice, but a large part of what we are trying to do is to create a better world, where working with the planet rather than against it is considered the norm.

Local and regional resources should be sought out and used in preference to resources from overseas, or resources the extraction or transport of which involves long distances or high environmental cost.

When expressing or calculating costs of materials, products and services, the full environmental cost of extraction, manufacture, transport, storage, use and disposal should be taken into account.

We aim to reduce waste to zero; we encourage waste reduction, recycling, reuse, refusal to accept waste in the first instance, and rethinking business and manufacturing processes so as to produce less or no waste.  We reject the concept of planned obsolescence.

We aim to use energy as efficiently, effectively and intelligently as we can, to reduce where possible our dependance on non-renewable forms of energy and to encourage the use and implementation of renewable sources of energy.

We recognise the importance of biodiversity, we accept that it is our duty to preserve and protect the natural habitat and to do nothing in our business practices or outcome that harms or threatens that habitat.

We encourage collaboration, cooperation and consensus, believing these to be more important than competition.

We insist on fair, just and equitable treatment of colleagues, employees, customers, clients and suppliers.

We support fair trade movements, workers’ rights movements, socially and environmentally aware suppliers, partners, resource and utility providers, manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers.

We emphasise sufficiency, not excess; needs rather than desires; durability rather than expendability.