‘Going green’ has been a big part of our everyday lives here at Five Senses Coffee. All three states in which we have offices and roasteries have played a key role in pioneering this important initiative; but what does it actually mean?
It’s very simple really. To be ‘green’ means making decisions, pursuing information and leading a lifestyle which has the best interests of our planet at heart. The aim? To preserve natural resources, protect the environment and encourage discussions around how we can do better.
I feel very lucky to be working for a company which holds this topic in such high regard and which is supportive of its staff being proactive in changing the way we run our day to day lives. I would love to share with you what Five Senses is doing to minimise our negative impact on the local and global environment.
To start with, we are working with the wonderful humans at ReGround, a Melbourne-based start-up, which picks up our ground coffee waste from the Barista Academy and Roastery and repurposes it by delivering it to local community gardens who use it in composting. To date, ReGround have saved a huge 40 tonnes of ground coffee from landfill.
Our Academy and office spaces have also been equipped with EcoBins, meaning all our waste is separated into recycling, non-recyclable items and organic waste. By doing this, we have forced ourselves to reflect on the amount of landfill waste we produce. We have equipped our kitchen with a counter top compost bin; it turns our organic waste into nutrient-rich fertiliser which is used to feed the Academy plants, and some of us utilise it in our home gardens as well.
The Victorian roastery in Cheltenham is pretty much 100% green. Currently all our waste is being recycled in a meaningful way. For starters, the shrink wrap (which we use in green coffee deliveries wrapped around pallets) and the GrainPro bags (which hold our green coffee inside hessian sacks) are collected and dropped off to Astron Plastics who then recycle them into conduit for electrical cabling.
All coffee chaff (chaff is a by-product of roasting coffee, it is the skin or hull that encompasses the bean in the cherry) is also collected by Dirty Hands and used as fertilizer.
Some of our team have also registered to take part in a Nationwide initiative called Plastic Free July. It is a wonderful way of addressing the amount of single use plastic in our everyday lives and you can choose to participate for a week or the whole month.
As much as we would love to be 100% waste free and sustainable, there are aspects of our Going Green journey that we are still working on, like making sure we turn the lights off in rooms which aren’t in use.
This principle also applies to electrical appliances (like espresso machines and brew units), especially those which are not in use overnight. We’re still on the lookout for recyclable coffee bags and know that this has been of concern to our customers too.
I hope this short blog post has inspired some action – we challenge you all to go green too! If you have any suggestions or ideas surrounding the topic, we’d would love to hear from you. #fivesensesgoesgreen
Some useful links to help get you started!
- War on Waste (doco series)
- Urban Compost Bin
- ReGround (Melbourne)
- Dirty Hands Waste Management (Victoria)
- Astron Plastics (Victoria)
- EcoBins
- Plastic Free July
