The Big Sustainability Expo | Sustainability In Events

Last week on Thursday 22^nd September, JBX PaperPak exhibited at the Big Sustainability Expo 2022 in Southampton. We were blown away by the positive response we received from everyone who visited our stand, and we were overjoyed to see both the number and variety of businesses out there who share our passion for sustainability.

Promoting corporate sustainability is among the core values that drive us here at JBX PaperPak; seeing the great work being done by so many other businesses in this space was truly inspirational for us, and it motivates us to keep going.

We are incredibly proud to have represented JBX as a Sustainability Champion at the event. Sustainability Champions pledge to support and assist businesses as they navigate the implementation of their corporate sustainability strategies. Given how closely we work with our clients to help them future-proof their businesses with good sustainability practices, being a Sustainability Champion was a natural fit for us.

In addition to being a Sustainability Champion, we are incredibly proud to have made it as far as being a finalist for this year’s ‘Bold Move’ award at the show. Getting to where we are today has been a constant uphill battle; we started JBX PaperPak in early 2020, just before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. With the pandemic came many lockdowns, each of which forced the majority of businesses that use paper straws to close down for months at a time.

This put us in a difficult situation – we were producing millions of paper straws every week, but we had no one to sell them to. The pressure to shut down our operation was very real, but we were not overcome by it. We kept our factory operating, we kept on all of our staff and we kept making straws.

This was a huge risk for us to take but, now that we have come out the other side of the pandemic, we are very glad we took it. Just as businesses started to open up again, the world economy was hit with a mass shortage of shipping containers due to port closures in China. Businesses were struggling to get their regular supply of imported straws, but we produce all of our straws in Dublin and had tens of millions of them ready and waiting to go.

JBX went from producing millions of straws per week with no customers to buy them to now being in such demand that we make straws to order. We have grown our team and expanded our product range to make high-quality environmentally friendly paper straws as widely available as possible.

We look forward to seeing faces old and new at more events in the future. Make sure you are following us on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook, as well as regularly checking our website to stay up to date with JBX PaperPak and everything upcoming that we have planned.