Bringing you a wide range of eco and ethical furnishings, accessories and eco gifts to brighten up your home including ideas for the bedroom, living room, kitchen and bathroom. All products are ethically sourced, many are hand-made, and Biome supports small, carefully selected, eco aware co-operatives where possible. From beautiful organic cotton bed linen to dazzling recycled glass kitchen tableware and living room lighting, to fair trade toys, and bamboo knife blocks, be inspired by the finest in eco and ethical home furnishings and green gifts.

When we founded Biome Lifestyle, three years ago, we thought that the two principles we would work to were simply style and the need to work in harmony with the natural environment. It turns out that the world is rather more complicated than that!
Style is still our guiding light, of course, but the ethical principles we now uphold are broader and much more complex than simple eco-friendliness.

Of course the world’s ecology is vitally important to us all, and globalisation is not basically environmentally friendly. Apart from anything else, mass consumerism uses up our planet’s finite natural resources, and contributes to global warming.
Plus, mass farming uses massive amounts of pesticides and fertilisers, and industrial-scale production can produce industrial quantities of toxins.

But globalised consumption has human side effects. It can lead to the ruthless exploitation of people in industrial sweatshops in poor countries, and to the impoverishment of the small-scale farmers who have to sell their goods to large-scale buyers in the developed world.

So now we have a kind of checklist of questions that we ask ourselves when we are looking for new products. We start, of course, with the basic issue of whether our customers will like the “look” of the item. Will it look good in your home? But then we get down to the ethics of the story behind the product.

We look at the impact of its production and sale, to see if it damages the environment in any way, either by its use of local resources, or by the way it’s transported. We like the use of recycled materials, and the production of recyclable products. Sustainable sources of raw materials are important, as are properly managed forests. And transport to the UK by ship would always be preferred to airfreight.

We look at who makes it, and how they are organised. We won’t sell products where we don’t know the full story. We tend to favour co-operative or family unit production, because we feel that this reduces the probability of unfair exploitation. If we are thinking of sourcing from a company, we investigate their policies on pay rates, opportunities for training, and the position of the company in its local community.

We respect craftsmanship, so handmade items are important to us. It’s good to think that skills built up over generations can still produce products from traditional materials that look good in a 21st century home!
Often we find that the items you might want to see are produced far away, and are brought to the UK by a network of trading organisations. We always investigate the networks to see if the trade is fair to the producers. Sometimes we don’t need to check beyond their “Fairtrade” certificates. But the small-scale producers and importers we tend to deal with often cannot afford to invest in certification, so we do the checking you would want to do for yourselves, and make sure that the principles of fair trade are followed.