Environment

Natural Wood Furniture, Reclaimed Wood Furniture & Vintage Home Décor

Here at Redefine Home, we are all about sustainability.  It has been the core of how we do business from day one.  Many ideas come to mind when thinking about 'green' business, but we believe it starts with the philosophy of being socially responsible and environmentally conscious in daily practice.

Every decision we make in this company is considered based on the positive or negative impacts it will have on the people involved, the environment, and the company itself.  We believe that the chances of success are greater when you live passionately and with good conscience.

There is a lot of information out there and sometimes it can be confusing to decifer what exactly constitutes a sustainable company.  Because we like you, we've broken our current (and always evolving) environmental attributes down into a few categories to make it easier to see what we are all about.

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• Products

• We take every opportunity to source products that are:

•made in the US
•artisan made by people we know or feel like we know
•found objects that we give a new life
•fair trade*
•environmentally responsible
•safe for humans

Furniture

We are constantly hunting for high quality, well designed vintage or unique furniture pieces constructed using:

•low or no voc stains, paints and adhesives
•salvaged and repurposed materials
•sustainably forested or reclaimed wood
•recycled metals

We've also included a Green Rating for each of our products on the site.  This rating system is based on the elements listed above and we describe which elements are at work in each piece.  Look for the green leaves

to quickly see the level of sustainable criteria each product meets.

Shipping

As an online retailer, it can be difficult to stay sustainable when the whole business revolves around using fossil fuels and mass amounts of materials to ship products around the world.  This is an area where we try to make the best decisions given our options (as soon as they invent the teleporter we are so on board!)

So to start, we have done our homework in selecting shipping companies that also make responsible decisions.

Some of our vendors are able to drop-ship items directly to the customer.  This means that a product makes a single trip to you instead of being shipped to us and then again to you.  For the items that we do ship from our warehouse, we use recycled, recyclable and biodegradeable packaging.  We also like to make our packaging cool so that you want to reuse it.

Office

In the office we try to do as much as we possibly can.  It's where we have near full control and, hey, we work here so we want it to be nice.

The office space itself is very energy efficient, from lightbulbs to equipment, and we never leave a room without turning off the lights...ok, almost never.  We don't like toxic things so we are careful with the materials we bring into the space.  Our furnishings are mostly repurposed, custom built or purchased by other eco-minded companies (or we've just had it a long time).

Everyone here makes an effort to minimize waste.  Our office supplies are recycled and recylcable as much as possible.  We love to attend green tradeshows and stock up on those cool recycled carboard pens!

It's still not quite possible to be paper-free but we do try to keep the paper usage down and, of course, it's recycled.

We recycle everything we can and some of us are known to go to extreme lengths to sort objects so that they can be recycled...like removing metal spirals from old notebooks to recycle the used paper and collect unused paper to make new notepads.  We creatively reuse things and encourage our customers to do the same.

General Company Policies

We believe in being nice people to work with and work for.  We love small businesses and try to use them whenever we can - everything is better when you are connected to people instead of faceless corporations and sterile technology.  Don't get us wrong, we love our technology, we just like knowing there's a heartbeat on the other side of it.

As one of the founding members of an organization called the Sustainable Business Leadership Council, we are also dedicated to helping other busineses become more sustainable.  We've spent hundreds of volunteer hours delevoping ways to make it viable for companies large and small to 'go green.'  We are heavily involved in our local community both on the business and consumer sides, which makes us proud to call ourselves a sustainable business.

*Fair Trade helps to ensure that the people who make the things we buy are paid a fair wage and given the opportunity for a safe and healthy life.  Please visit the Fair Trade Federation for more information on systems and certification.
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