Alex Pigott, the warden at the RSPB Marshside Reserve in Southport has just sent us these great pictures of their new Otter Holt being installed.
Installing the otter holt on the Marshside reserve
RSPB, Otters and Mink
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National Nest Box Week
To help to celebrate National Nest Box Week, Filcris will be offering a 10% discount on all our Recycled Plastic Swift Nest boxes until the end of February. No need to fill in complicated forms, use voucher codes which might not work or accept a life time of marketing spam. We have just dropped the prices until February 29th. You can see the products here.
Made by our own fair hands
I have been looking at some other recycled plastic product sellers’ websites this morning researching a couple of jobs we have been asked to tender for and I am struck by how many of them have the same terrible pictures of products they have obviously got from another supplier. I know they don’t stock them (in fact I know that a couple have recently gone bust) and certainly do not make them.
Which is why I am glad we have taken the decision to only show our own high quality photographs, and why we make it clear when products like planks and and posts are sourced from abroad. We respect our customers and think that treating them like idiots is an unwise strategy for any business. Of course there are some products (the Disabled Fishing Platforms for example) which we don’t have photographs for yet, so we need to use a Sketchup drawing to illustrate them, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule. So we urge any potential buyers of recycled plastic products to ask searching questions – we do not flinch from telling the truth and we have done so for over twenty years.
Filcris products used to help save rare sandpiper
The rare and beautiful Spoon Billed Sandpiper being brought back from the brink of extinction at WWT Slimbridge. (Image reproduced courtesy of C Zöckler / ArcCona)
Filcris recycled plastic sheet is being used in a project to save one of the worlds rarest and most endangered species. The Spoon Billed Sandpiper, a type of wading bird from the far east of Siberia is now down to 100 pairs and is on the verge of extinction. A pioneering captive breeding project at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust Slimbridge reserve hopes to increase the population and reintroduce them to the wild. Whilst in captivity, the birds are effectively quarantined and vulnerable to pests and diseases so WWT used Filcris Ecohoarding Board to line their enclosures.
No more otter tube!
We sold the last of the special tubing we had got in to use as entrance tunnels for our otter holts to Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust today. We have been trying to find a suitable replacement for over eighteen months, but so far have drawn a blank. We will keep looking however, so watch this space…
260mm diameter tubing being fixed to otter holt in Chris Matcham's workshop
Assembly Instructions for 3 Seater Bench & Picnic Table
We have just uploaded a new video showing assembly instructions for our 3 seater park bench here:
Assembly Instructions for 3 Seater Park Bench
We have also uploaded instructions for our standard picnic table here:
New Eco Mink Raft Launched
After a lot of development we have now brought out the ECO MINK RAFT, a lighter, lower cost mink raft which has many of the benefits of our top of the range Deluxe model but at over 40% lower cost. This means that it is comparable to the wooden products available on the market, but it will not rot, absorb water and can be easily stored, transported and inspected in the field:
See here for more details.
Product country of origin added our website
The recycled plastic industry has come a very long way in the 20 odd years we have been involved in it. When we first started selling recycled plastic a lot of the suppliers were frankly pretty dodgy and the products were sometimes atrociously bad. We got through a lot of saw blades wrecked by lumps of plastic containing buried nails and no one coudl tell anyone where there products came from.
Things have improved enormously since then of course, but some people will always prefer not to be honest with their customers, particularly when it comes to where their products come from. We think that our customers welcome honesty, so we have amended our website to show them where the material we are selling has come from.
At the moment we are only including recycled plastic profiles and assemblies built by us with a with a single country of origin. These all come from either the UK, The Netherlands or Germany and are indicated by a simple flag:
Hopefully this will be helpful to our customers, and when we figure out a way to improve the transparency of the more complicated products in a range we will add these to the range. We would encourage all customers visiting our website to ask us where the products come from, and do the same on other recycled plastic supplier’s websites. You might be surprised by the answers, if they will tell you that is…
Creating Landscapes
The Filcris stand at the Landscape Juice Creating Landscapes Exhibition at Capel Manor, with the London & South East Area Sales Manager Brian Geen pottering about tidying up before the hordes of customers descended and stripped our stand of samples and leaflets in five minutes flat. Ok so there weren’t hordes of visitors to the show, but everyone who came to the stand seemed genuinely interested and we all left feeling very positive.
People seemed particularly taken with our newest additions to our range, the Eco Hoarding Board and HIPS Decking Planks, and by the end of the second day we had indeed run out of samples of these two products.
Glendale Junction 10th Anniversary Celebration
I spent Saturday 24th September as a guest at the Glendale Junction 10th Anniversary Celebration, demonstrating how recycled plastic can be used as a base for garden railway tracks, especially our new Ladder Frame System we now offer. There was a lot of interest and Brian and Caroline (and all their friends and colleagues) were very welcoming indeed – I’m looking forward to the next bash! And thanks a lot for all the tea and cake!!