As part of our business evolution and journey towards carbon neutrality, we’re constantly looking for new and innovative ways to implement more sustainable practices.
Following discussions with universities focused on packaging reduction methods, our founder and MD Bryan came up with a zero waste coffee scheme.
Since 2018 we have offered customers the option to accept coffee deliveries in reusable food-grade plastic tubs. This has been a big hit for large volume sites, such as The University of Sheffield, thanks to the ease of process and alignments of values.
The scheme has also proved popular for retailers offering customers packaging-free products, such as Unwrapped in Crookes. It’s something we’d love to offer the at-home market from a collection point at our roastery sometime in the future… watch this space!
Each easy-to-stack tub is batch coded and sealed, then after customers decant their beans we collect the tubs and sterilise them, ready to be used again. This has saved a total of 7,880 coffee bags since the strategy was implemented.
The coffee bags we do use (1kg wholesale and 250g retail) are now made from monoplastic LDPE, which is fully recyclable.
To complement the offering, we generate our own box filler packing where required, using our cardboard shredder, which has negated the use of packing peanuts. All cardboard packaging that comes into the roastery is put through the shredder, as well as larger items from our team’s homes.
Our coffee is packed into hessian sacks at origin and we send these to K&H Ellis jute recyclers, where they are shredded and repurposed for products such as carpet underlay. The GrainPro bags that line the hessian sacks are also reused for our coffee chaff waste and bin liners for our warehouse and for litter picking sessions in local parks, which our customer service manager Lizzie undertakes.
As tech evolves we will continue to research and implement the best options we can find.
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