In focus: Destroying eyewear is crushing top designer

In July this year the press got their hands on a story which would make any normal person gasp, that the iconic British Burberry ‘burns nearly £30 million worth of clothes and cosmetics every year, to avoid them being sold at a discount and potentially damaging their brand image’.

It is a shocking figure, but I totally get it. It is a serious problem that I too am faced with. My company is tiny compared to a brand like Burberry and our waste will be a fraction of theirs but we waste too.

You will be disgusted to learn that a few weeks ago, I drove my car over approximately 1,000 pairs of perfect spectacle frames. I drove over them five times just to be sure we had damaged them enough so that we could dispose of them in the dustbin and not fear that some opportunist would fish them out and sell them on eBay at a huge discount. Five times felt like a suitable amount of times to adequately destroy them and deem them unfit for anything other than landfill where they will sit for next 200 years, not disintegrating. I feel sick writing this. It is madness.