Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
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wholesale clients have a policy that delivery people cannot leave the store with anything—if you enter with a delivery housed in a cardboard box, you cannot take that box out when you're finished. Our drivers would leave the boxes for recycling, which meant we constantly had to replenish our own supplies. We've been able to change this situation simply by talking to our customers. When we proposed to one major chain that they allow us to keep our boxes to be reused, they were open to the idea. This has allowed us to reuse each box five or six times. By getting more out of each box, we have seen a reduc- tion in carton costs of more than 50 percent and are saving around $50,000 annually while at the same time helping the planet. In addition, we are now looking into a packag- ing solution that will be sturdier than cardboard and will allow us to get even more use from each container. The idea is to use a crate made of cor- rugated plastic that's built by a company called Technology Container Corporation (TCC). These crates are designed to break down easily but are sturdy enough to get bro- ken down and rebuilt more than 300 times. Although these boxes cost five times as much as their card- board counterparts, we get 50 to 60 times as many uses out of each vessel. TCC has estimated that a complete switch to these boxes would equate to a savings of $450,000 to $500,000 over the course of five years. Furthermore, because we will need fewer deliveries of new boxes, the energy consumption in the delivery process will decrease by 87 percent; to put it another way, 5.8 billion BTUs and 400 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent will be eliminated. In the coffee industry, there are several materials that are called ITW Angleboard that makes protective packaging materi- als. ITW has found a use for many different materials—including the foil that goes into our bags—that would otherwise be sitting in landfills. We met with ITW, and they agreed to take six tons of excess material (which had been wasting space in our ware- house) off our hands, free of charge. ITW also agreed to take all our additional foil waste on an ongoing basis. The cost for us to transport all this waste and put it in the landfill would have been massive. Now it's being repurposed as a composite material used in shipping pallets, at no cost to us. After seeing the differ- ence made by these small (but drastic) changes, we knew there were other areas where we could improve, and we thought we could get our cus- tomers on board to help us eliminate waste. We decided to look back at where the company start- ed: office coffee. For most of our office GREEN UPGRADE: Boyer's Coffee recently brought on new packaging (left) that uses a universal bag and stickers, cutting down on labor and materials. accounts, the coffee is delivered in two-ounce single-pot "pillow packs." Not surprisingly, a whole lot of these packs get used on a daily basis. We are in the process of working with each of our office accounts to develop processes whereby they save this trash for our drivers to remove when they next service the cof- fee stations. The drivers will then bring this waste back to our plant for ITW to collect later. Our business has been around and set in its inherently non-recyclable, including many of the materials used to package roasted coffee. These aren't recyclable because they're permeated with the oils released by the beans, so changing mate- rials would not make a difference. So instead of "recycling," we looked to "repurposing." At the Annual Sustainability Summit in Bentonville, Ark., last February, we learned about a company ways for 45 years, a fact that means change can sometimes be difficult to implement. Everyone involved has had to take on extra work to collaborate and make these visions become reality. We are truly grateful for each and every one of our employees, colleagues and customers who have worked so hard to help us facilitate this change. We don't have the resources to change the world, but we do have the wherewithal to positively affect our local environment. All the changes we made came at little or no cost to us, yet the results have been tremendous. Kermit was certainly right all those years ago—it's not easy being green, but it's well worth the effort. freshcup.com January 2012 55 COURTESY OF BOYER'S COFFEE