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.