In honour of its 125th anniversary, The Academic Bookstore is renewing their packing materials and launching returnable shopping bags designed for customer use. Lindström will supply the bags and take care of their regular maintenance.
“On our anniversary, we want to take a big step towards sustainability and offer our customers alternative products to replace old-school plastic bags. The Returnable shopping bag can be picked up at the checkout counter for a deposit of 3 euros. The deposit will be returned to the customer when the bag is returned to the store”, says Anne Kariniemi, Managing Director at The Academic Bookstore.
Our shared goal with The Academic Bookstore is to recycle a whopping 10,000 textile bags a year. We aim to ensure that the bags are properly maintained and that they can be used for as long as possible.
“The used bags returned by customers will be delivered to Lindström for washing. We will also check if the products need to be repaired. This way we can ensure that the bags have a long lifecycle and that they stay in good condition. The recycling will also create a story for the returnable shopping bags. The same bag could have been used by a favourite author and a politician”, says Ilkka Eskola, Sales Manager at Lindström. The bags have been installed with an RFID chip (radio frequency identification) that helps us collect bag-specific data of how many times the bags have been washed.
The returnable shopping bags have been designed by a well-known Finnish artist Ville Andersson. He says that the designs depict not only the bags’ intended use but also the history of The Academic Bookstore.
