Locally sourced and low carbon footprint are buzzwords when talking about eco-friendly products, and these concepts are very close to our hearts when making our beeswax wraps.
Here at BeECOnscious we want to spread the eco-friendly love around the world but we want to do it in an ethical and mindful manner. To that end we take local sourcing very seriously. While we often ship our products far and wide, we reckon this is more than balanced out by the fact that we source all our materials as locally as we can. This also gives us the advantage of being able to properly check the credentials of our suppliers, both as eco-friendly companies and fair employers.
While many eco-friendly makers in Europe and the US will have to source their raw materials from far away, we are very lucky here in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand to be able to get most of our materials very close to home.
Beeswax
The beeswax we use for our famous beeswax wraps comes from a local bee-keeping cooperative, with great ethics and values, who don’t use any chemicals in the management of their hives, and harvest the wax without disturbing the bees. And even better, all the bee-keepers are based in a 10-50km radius of our SuperBee workshop.
Cotton
Our cotton supply chain has been getting shorter and shorter over the years. When we first launched, our GOTS certified organic cotton came from India, as most GOTS cotton does (we would guess this is the case for many other beeswax wraps too). Then we found a new supplier in Central Thailand, moving much closer to home. Now we’re very excited to announce that our GOTS certified organic cotton comes from Northern Thailand, our local region, and with cotton you can’t get much more local than that!
Fabric printing
We used to get our fabric printed near Bangkok but now we’re happy to have found a high-quality printer with food-safe inks, in Chiang Mai, so our fabric doesn’t have to travel to be printed.
Coconut Oil
Thailand is a major producer of high-quality organic coconut oil, and we’re lucky to have this available on our doorstep – so of course we buy this ingredient for our beeswax wraps as locally as possible.
Tree resin
High quality dammar resin is part of SuperBee's beeswax mixture, making our wraps just the right amount of sticky, but we have yet to find this in Thailand (we’re looking). However, we have an excellent provider in neighbouring Vietnam, who can send by land rather than air. As we don’t need to use a lot of this ingredient, it fortunately adds very little to our carbon footprint.
Bamboo
Our bamboo comes from either Thailand or neighbouring Vietnam, but we’re keen to source it all locally – our next goal!
Packaging
All of SuperBee’s 100% recycled packaging come from a wonderful social enterprise based in Chiang Mai city, only few kilometres away from our packing room. Supporting local community and minimizing carbon footprint, what could be better!
