SUSTAINABILITY

At Paxman we are very aware of our environmental responsibilities and make every effort to choose the eco-friendly option whenever we have the choice. These choices include individual decisions on how to travel to work, cutting the use of plastic bags, offsetting CO2 emissions when flying to exhibitions and trade shows and choosing materials and shipping methods when sending horns around the world to customers.

One example of a small way in which we are helping to save waste and protect the planet focusses on our packing materials. A few years ago we became aware of the development of corn starch packing chips as an alternative to the traditional polystyrene. These are a little more expensive, but they break down with water and biodegrade quickly rather than go to landfill. Having tested them to make sure that they worked ok, all our horns are now shipped using these chips, as well as with biodegradable bubble wrap and re-cycled cardboard.

The sustainability of our horns is also very important to us and while a 2.5kg piece of brass might not seem an obviously eco-friendly product, there are many features that enhance it’s eco credentials in the modern world!

Brass itself (a mixture of copper and zinc) is a material that in one form or another has been around for thousands of years. The modern process of melting and mixing the copper and zinc, pressing, rolling and annealing it etc is quite energy intensive. The manufacture of the various components and the process of assembling the horn also use heat and power, so the finished instrument does not have a negligible carbon footprint when it comes out of our workshop. However, when the average useful lifespan of a Paxman horn is taken into account, the reality of the lifetime footprint is diminished. There are many Paxman horns still being played professionally after 50+ years of continual use. To aid this longevity and sustainability, we continue to manufacture spare parts and to make spare or replacement parts available to everyone. Our workshop can repair and look after your horn so that it will last a lifetime of playing and continue to have value to many subsequent owners.

This is also the approach taken with our line of student and intermediate horns. When deciding on a partner company to build them for us, it was vitally important that we chose someone who could build quality instruments, not only because any Paxman horn must compare favourably with any competitors, but because we want them to be instruments that can stand up to the rigours of every-day use, to last and to have a real value. Our workshop has seen many ‘cheap’ horns which after only a year or two need work doing but are simply not economic to repair. This was simply not an option for us and is borne out by the longevity of our Academy etc horns both in the hands of private owners and in our rental scheme. Quite an achievement when looked at in the context of some of the built-in obsolescence and apparent necessity to upgrade inherent in the design of most modern machines, whether laptops, phones, cars or washing machines!

Whatever your views on climate change, energy conservation etc., it is undeniable that we are all being asked to think and behave responsibly. There are many ways that we can do this but turning the electronic gadgets off and playing the horn for an extra hour a day might just have some small benefit for everyone, as well as making us all better players! 😉