Privacy policy
This policy explains what personal information Sustainable Design Studio Ltd collects, why, who we share it with, how long we keep it and what your rights are. It covers our website sustainabledesign.studio, our online shop, enquiries, orders, newsletters, phone and messaging, our advertising, and our Plastic Scanner app (section 12).
1. Who we are
We are Sustainable Design Studio Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 15816520, VAT number GB473231505). We are the controller of the personal information described in this policy.
- Registered office: Tapnage Farm, Titchfield Lane, Wickham, Fareham, PO17 5PQ, England
- Workshop and postal address: Hart Stud, Hulfords Lane, Hartley Wintney, RG27 8AG, United Kingdom
- Email: contact@sustainabledesign.studio
- Phone: +44 118 403 2000
- ICO registration number: ZC258563
We are a small company and have not appointed a data protection officer, as the law does not require one for a business like ours. Rory Dickens, our director, is responsible for data protection.
2. The information we collect
Information you give us
| When | What |
|---|---|
| You send an enquiry through our contact form | Name, email address, your message, and (if you choose) how you heard about us |
| You email, phone, message us on WhatsApp or book a call | Your name, contact details, what you tell us, and for calls the number you call from and any voicemail you leave |
| You place an order on our website | Name, company or organisation, billing and delivery addresses, email address, phone number, what you ordered, and your VAT or tax number if you give it |
| You ask for a quote or pay by invoice | Contact and billing details, purchase order numbers and the details of the quote or order |
| You ask for help, a repair, a return or a warranty claim | Your order details, photos or videos you send us, and machine serial numbers |
| You sign up to our newsletter | Your email address |
| You apply for a job | Your CV, contact details and anything else you choose to send |
Please do not send us sensitive information (for example about health) or personal information about children. If you are a school or college, we only need the details of the staff we deal with.
Information collected automatically when you use our website
Our website and the services we use on it collect your IP address, device and browser type, the pages you visit, how you arrived (for example from a search, an advert or another website), and, if you arrive from one of our adverts, an advert reference (such as a Google or ChatGPT click reference and the campaign that showed you the advert). We collect this using cookies and similar technology; see section 7. If you arrive from one of our Google adverts, our phone number may be shown as a Google forwarding number so that we can tell a call came from an advert.
Information we get from other people
- Marketplaces. If you buy from us through Precious Plastic Bazar, eBay or Etsy, the marketplace passes us your name, delivery address and order details.
- Payment and delivery companies tell us whether a payment went through, flag suspected fraud, and send us delivery updates.
- Advertising platforms (Google, Meta, OpenAI) give us reports about how our adverts perform. These reports are mostly totals and do not normally identify you.
- Publicly available business information. We sometimes find contact details for organisations, such as schools, universities and manufacturers, from their public websites, so that we can tell them about our machines. We use only work contact details and we tell the person where we found them when we first get in touch.
3. What we use it for, and our legal reasons
Data protection law requires a legal reason ("lawful basis") for each use. Ours are:
| What we do | Our lawful basis |
|---|---|
| Answer your enquiries and send quotes | Taking steps you asked for before a contract, or our legitimate interest in answering business enquiries |
| Take payment for, make, pack, ship and export your order, including customs paperwork | Performing our contract with you |
| Provide support, repairs, returns and warranty service | Performing our contract with you, and our legal obligations under consumer law |
| Send service messages about your order | Performing our contract with you |
| Keep accounting, tax, VAT and export records | Legal obligation |
| Prevent fraud and keep our website secure | Our legitimate interest in protecting our business and customers |
| Send our newsletter | Your consent, which you can withdraw at any time using the unsubscribe link or by emailing us |
| Contact organisations such as schools, universities and manufacturers about our machines, using work contact details from their public websites | Our legitimate interest in telling organisations about products relevant to their work; you can ask us to stop at any time and we will not contact you again |
| Email existing customers about similar products | Our legitimate interest in keeping customers informed; you can opt out at any time |
| Understand how our website is used and improve it (analytics) | Your consent, given through our cookie choices |
| Measure and improve our advertising, and show our adverts to people who have visited our website | Your consent, given through our cookie choices (see section 7 for the position until our cookie banner is live) |
| Share hashed email addresses and phone numbers with Google to measure adverts and build advertising audiences (section 4) | Your consent, where the law or Google's rules require it; otherwise our legitimate interest in measuring our advertising. You can object at any time |
| Improve our products and services from the feedback and questions we receive | Our legitimate interest in developing better products |
| Consider job applications | Taking steps you asked for before a contract, and our legitimate interest in recruiting |
| Make, defend or settle legal claims | Our legitimate interest in protecting our legal rights |
When we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed our interests against yours. You can ask us for details and you can object (section 10).
We do not make decisions about you using only automated means that have legal or similarly significant effects. Advertising platforms use automated systems to decide which adverts to show, and you can control this through the settings in section 4.
4. Advertising and measurement
We advertise with Google Ads, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), OpenAI (adverts in ChatGPT) and eBay (promoted listings on eBay). Here is what that means for your information.
Cookies and pixels on our website. Google, Meta and OpenAI provide code (often called tags or pixels) that runs on our website. It uses cookies and similar technology to record visits, particularly visits that start with one of our adverts, and actions such as sending an enquiry or placing an order. This lets us see which adverts lead to enquiries and orders, and lets these companies show our adverts to people who have visited our website before. Our own website code also remembers which of our adverts brought you to us and attaches that reference (campaign details, not your name) to any enquiry you send. See section 7 for your choices.
Hashed contact details. When you place an order, and in future when you send an enquiry, the Google tag on our website may turn your email address and phone number into a hashed code (using a one-way process called SHA256) and send that code to Google, so that Google can match your order or enquiry to an advert you clicked. Google cannot read your original email address or phone number from the code. The Meta and OpenAI pixels can do the same with contact details you enter on our website.
Uploads to Google. We may also send Google hashed email addresses and phone numbers of people who have enquired or bought from us, together with the date and value of an order, so that Google can tell us which adverts led to sales that happened later, by phone or email. We may also send Google hashed email addresses of customers and of newsletter subscribers, so that Google can show our adverts to them, or to people like them, or avoid showing adverts to people who have already bought.
How the advertising companies use the information. Google, Meta and OpenAI use the information they receive under their own privacy policies and, in some cases, for their own purposes. You can read how Google does this at https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.
Your advertising choices
- Refuse or withdraw advertising cookies at any time using the cookie choices on our website (section 7).
- Ask us not to include you in any advertising measurement or audience upload: email contact@sustainabledesign.studio with the subject "Advertising opt out". We will stop, and will remove you from any list we have uploaded.
- Manage personalised advertising directly with the companies: Google at https://adssettings.google.com, Meta in your Facebook or Instagram account under Accounts Centre, Ad preferences, and OpenAI in your ChatGPT settings.
6. Transfers outside the UK
Some of the companies above are based in, or store data in, the United States, the European Economic Area, Canada or elsewhere. When your information leaves the UK we make sure it is protected by one of the safeguards UK law allows: a UK government decision that the country protects personal data adequately (this covers the European Economic Area and Canada, and US companies certified under the UK Extension to the EU US Data Privacy Framework), or contract terms approved for international transfers (the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses). If we ship to you outside the UK, your delivery details necessarily go to carriers and customs authorities in your country so that we can deliver your order. You can ask us for more information about the safeguards for a particular transfer.
8. How long we keep your information
| Information | How long |
|---|---|
| Orders, invoices, payments and export records | 6 years after the end of the financial year in which the order was completed, to meet tax and company law |
| Customer and warranty records for machines we have sold | 7 years from delivery (our 12-month warranty plus 6 years), so that we can support your machine and deal with any claim |
| Enquiries that do not lead to an order | 2 years from our last contact with you |
| Emails, call recordings and voicemails | 2 years, unless they form part of an order or claim above |
| Newsletter subscribers | Until you unsubscribe. We then keep your email address on a "do not contact" list so that we do not email you again |
| Job applications | 6 months after we make our decision, unless you agree to us keeping them longer |
| Advertising audiences uploaded to Google | Removed when you ask, and in any case within 540 days |
| Cookies | As shown in section 7 |
9. Keeping your information safe
We use reputable providers and limit access to the people who need it. We never see or store your full card details; card payments are handled by Stripe and PayPal. No system is completely secure, and if a breach puts you at risk we will tell you and, where required, the ICO.
10. Your rights
You have the right to:
- see the personal information we hold about you and get a copy (a "subject access request");
- correct information that is wrong or incomplete;
- delete your information, where we no longer need it or have no other legal reason to keep it;
- restrict how we use it while a question is resolved;
- object to our use of it where we rely on legitimate interests. You can always object to direct marketing and to our advertising uses, and we will stop;
- withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on consent. This does not affect what we did before;
- move information you gave us to another organisation in a common digital format (data portability).
To use any of these rights, email contact@sustainabledesign.studio or write to us at the postal address in section 1. It is free. We may need to confirm your identity. We will reply within one month, or tell you within that month if we need up to two more months because the request is complex.
11. Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first by emailing contact@sustainabledesign.studio with the subject "Data protection complaint". We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days, look into it, keep you informed, and tell you the outcome without undue delay.
You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK regulator for data protection: https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or 0303 123 1113.
12. Plastic Scanner app
Plastic Scanner is our free Android app that tells you which plastic an item is made from. This section explains the extra information the app uses and why. The rest of this policy still applies, including who we are (section 1), transfers outside the UK (section 6), security (section 9), your rights (section 10), and complaints (section 11).
What the app collects
| When | What |
|---|---|
| You create an account | Your name and email address, or your Google sign-in. We never see your password. |
| You scan without an account | A temporary identifier that isn't linked to your name or email address. We do not store your photo. |
| You scan an item with an account | The photo you take and the result (what the item is, the likely plastic types, and how confident the result is), with the date and time. |
| You use the app over time | Your ratings of results, number of scans, collection, streak, and when you last used the app. |
| You allow notifications | A notification identifier for your phone, so we can send reminders. |
| You buy Premium | Google Play takes the payment. We only find out whether your subscription is active. We never see your card details. |
| You see adverts (free version) | Our advertising partner collects your phone's advertising ID, IP address, device details, and how you interact with adverts. |
The app asks for your camera only when you scan. It does not use your location, contacts, or microphone.
What we use it for, and our legal reasons
| What we do | Our lawful basis |
|---|---|
| Identify the plastic in your photos and show you the result | Providing the app you have chosen to use (performing our contract with you) |
| Keep your scan history, collection, streak, and Premium status | Performing our contract with you |
| Send reminders | Your consent, given through your phone's notification permission. You can turn notifications off at any time in your phone's settings |
| Show adverts in the free version, so we can keep it free | Our legitimate interest in funding the app. Adverts are personalised only if you agree (see "Your choices" below) |
| Keep the app secure and prevent misuse | Our legitimate interest in protecting the app and keeping it available |
| Improve the accuracy of our results, including using saved scan photos and results to train our own plastic identification models | Our legitimate interest in making Plastic Scanner more accurate. You can object at any time (see "Your choices" below). We never sell or publish your photos |
Who helps us run the app
The app runs on services from Google: hosting, sign-in, storage, notifications, security checks, analysing your photo with AI, adverts, and Premium payments through Google Play. Google does not use your photos to train its own AI. Google may store information in the UK, the European Economic Area, and the United States; section 6 explains how it is protected.
How long we keep it
| Information | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account, scans, photos, and app history | Until you delete your account. While your account exists, we may use your scan photos and results to improve our results and train our own plastic identification models |
| Notification identifier | Until you delete your account, or until it stops working |
| Advertising information | As set out in Google's privacy policy |
When you delete your account, we delete your information within 30 days. Encrypted backups are removed automatically within 90 days.
Your choices
- Adverts: if you are in the UK, the European Economic Area, or Switzerland, the app asks whether you agree to personalised adverts. You can change your answer at any time under Settings, Privacy choices. Premium removes adverts.
- Notifications: turn them off in your phone's settings.
- Improving our results: to stop us using your scan photos to improve Plastic Scanner, email contact@sustainabledesign.studio with the subject "Plastic Scanner photo opt out".
- Delete your account: email contact@sustainabledesign.studio with the subject "Plastic Scanner Account Deletion Request", or follow the steps at sustainabledesign.studio/plasticscanner/dataprotection.
Children
Plastic Scanner is not designed for children under 13, and you must be 13 or over to create an account. If you think a child under 13 has given us their information, email contact@sustainabledesign.studio and we will delete it.
13. Changes to this policy
We will update this policy when the way we use personal information changes. The date at the top shows when it last changed. If a change significantly affects you, we will tell you directly where we can.