Clouds are a symbol of nature – providing rainfall and cooler temperatures to sustain and grow our coffee. Our name -The Sustainable Coffee Company – reflects our interest in caring for the environment and our intention to operate to the highest sustainability standards.
Our vision is to offer incredible coffee and to be at the forefront of sustainable business practices. Some examples of our commitment to sustainability include:
We supply our coffee in 100% compostable bags.
We’re committed to upcycling and reconditioning used espresso machines to extend their life and to reduce unnecessary wastage. Reconditioned machines are works of art and retain – or have been retrofitted with – all the functionality of more modern machines, but with polished and die-cut recycled wood panelling, instrumentation, handles and even brands.
We’re also passionate about our relationship with Reground, a local initiative that collects coffee grounds from The Sustainable Coffee Company cafés and repurposes them as compost into community gardens. The Sustainable Coffee Company supports its clients in joining the Reground program.
More than 60,000 tonnes of coffee grounds are produced annually in Australia, most of which currently ends up in landfill, creating greenhouse gases as it breaks down. By diverting it through composting, it is a wonderful soil conditioner for growing food.
We collaborate with our sister company Biofilta to provide modular food garden systems to our customers. Working with Biofilta we’re able to support cafes to reuse their coffee grounds on-site and to produce vegetables and herbs for their café kitchen.
We all love coffee – you wouldn’t be reading this otherwise – but have you considered what effect your coffee purchase has on the environment, and on the world’s future coffee supplies?
The evidence is conclusive that climate change is already impacting coffee production. As the world continues to warm, climate volatility and resulting market complications will combine to cause problems for coffee producers and consumers.
Without strong action to reduce carbon emissions, climate change is projected ‘to cut the global area suitable for coffee production by as much as 50 per cent by 2050.’
This is the message delivered by The Climate Institute in a report commissioned by Fairtrade – but what are the consequences for the 25 million coffee growers globally who depend on this $19 billion industry?
We need to be supporting farmers who are coping with the implications of climate change, while acting locally to ensure we’re reducing our carbon footprint in our own business, and for our coffee through the rest of its life cycle. With this in mind, in addition to making ethical purchasing decision, The Sustainable Coffee Company is helping close the loop on café waste with sustainable solutions from the ground up.
It’s inevitable that cafes will continue to evolve their product, their service and their environment, but given our global climate emergency, what about focusing on environmental best practice and sustainability?
The future we envisage sees cafés operating with 100 per cent renewable energy generated at source or purchased over the grid. Chefs cooking on induction cooktops rather than gas, and coffee grounds and food waste cycled into cafés’ own pop-up farms. Single-use coffee cups would also (finally) be eliminated or at the very least, made of only 100 per cent compostable and sustainable materials.
It may seem like a long way into the future, but it’s not. We think the market is hungry for sustainable options and there are many immediate steps we can help our cafe partners take to improve their sustainability credentials. Our vision is to help specialty coffee destinations to become models of sustainable practices.
For the past 12 years, The Sustainable Coffee Company (the Port Melbourne roaster, formally known as Red Star Coffee and Cirrus Fine Coffee), has served the Australian café community with its trademark small-batch roasted and specialty-grade coffee. Despite our success we felt it was time to revitalise our business with a new name and logo, and encourage customers to reconsider our quality coffee offering and passion for sustainability.
First and foremost, we produce great-tasting specialty coffee, backed with excellent customer service, but we do that a commitment to innovation, sustainability and partnerships with our customers to help them improve their environmental performance.
The Sustainable Coffee Company uses sustainably sourced beans from the world’s most famous coffee growing regions.
Our transition to the The Sustainable Coffee Company brand represents the patterned feathery clouds that surround the world’s high-altitude mountains. It’s at this high altitude where the best coffee is grown, and rainfall and cooler temperatures sustain and grow the coffee crops. Our blends have also had a name overhaul to represent wind patterns, such as Tradewind featuring Brazilian, Colombian and Ethiopian beans.
Sustainability has always been in our DNA. We’ve been committed to sustainability, environmental best practice, and ethical sourcing, but we feel the market is only now starting to appreciate these things as defining points of difference in selecting a coffee roaster.
Those points of difference include The Sustainable Coffee Company’s commitment to compostable packaging. Our coffee is now packed into convex compostable bags with biodegradable labels. We use compostable takeaway cups through Biopak, and we support zero waste reusable cups with stock of Huskee coffee cups.
The Sustainable Coffee Company also encourages the upcycling and reconditioning of espresso machines to avoid unnecessary wastage. We work with Specht design and Boiling Point technicians to refurbish coffee machines and give them a new lease of life.
At our headquarters in Port Melbourne, we compost organic office waste in our pop-up urban farm.
Our office operates on 100 per cent accredited green energy sourced from Victorian wind and solar farms. Thanks to The Sustainable Coffee Company’s three sister companies – Australian Ecosystems, Biofilta, and The Cape – The Sustainable Coffee Company’s customers have direct assess to services that can provide the environmental solutions for cafés.
We are very happy to transfer our knowledge, expertise, and sustainable practices to the café market, and move to a more environmentally friendly footing.
We’re optimistic that it’s just a matter of time before we see zero emission cafés, and through The Cape housing development at Cape Paterson near Phillip Island, it’s already happening.
The Cape uses local builders and sustainability experts to create zero-emission, energy-efficient homes with low environmental impact. The residential community is making news headlines for its ability to eliminate energy bills.
To build sustainable landscapes, Australian Ecosystems collects seeds from wetlands and forests and grows up to several million plants at its Carrum Downs nursery in Victoria for land restoration and wetlands projects.
To drought-proof our cities, The Sustainable Coffee Company’s other sister company Biofilta is building large-scale stormwater harvesting systems to capture and filter hundreds of millions of litres of rainwater runoff each year, diverting the water into local parks and community gardens.
It also produces modular, low-maintenance pop-up farms made from wicking garden beds that store water and reduce weeds. This is a perfect garden solution for cafés with limited space to grow vegetables. In the next few years, we look forward to helping The Sustainable Coffee Company café clients design and install small-scale pop-up farms and edible landscapes at their sites.
We know that cafés are time poor. We know that in order for more businesses to uptake sustainable solutions, we have to make it efficient for them. It has to be easy to get involved, easy to maintain, and cost effective.
We can provide access to award-winning landscape designers, consultation and advice on energy efficient, zero emission fit-out, businesses can embrace the definition of sustainability not just through the coffee they drink, but in their daily operations in a revenue neutral or positive way.
With a global population increasing rapidly and climate change making agricultural production harder, there’s no time to wait.
If we don’t get a handle on these mega problems of climate change and food and plastic waste, it will become the largest challenge to the viability of our whole industry. Consumers, the public and coffee growers are pushing for solutions.
Ten years ago sustainable options were considered “too complex and costly”. But now, the cost of energy has doubled, solar panels have dropped in price by 90 per cent, and the gap between sustainable practices versus the old way of doing things has disappeared.
We want to be an example to the coffee community that coffee doesn’t just have to be sustainable, our actions can be too. We are on the verge of a really exciting uplift to low footprint, closed loop, circular economy living – all the solutions are at our fingertips.
Since our establishment more than 15 years ago, we’ve built an excellent reputation for lifting our customers’ coffee sales, coffee quality and customers experiences. We take the time to understand your needs, your clientele, and the style of coffee that will work best for you.
We provide on–site staff training to the highest standards of coffee-making and we offer a range of machinery options to suit your needs. We also have a network of on-call coffee machine technicians to ensure prompt and reliable responses to all emergencies and general service maintenance.
If you are interesting in stocking The Sustainable Coffee Company coffee call us on (03) 9681 8171 or email orders@sustainablecoffeecompany.com.au
We look forward to hearing from you.
