How green is your coffee cup?
When you order a cup of coffee from your favourite spot, do you ever question how good it is for the environment? Perhaps not, so we have tried to make it a little easier. As a nation, our preference for sustainable coffee and sustainable packaging is rising, drinkers want to know not only where their coffee comes from, but also if it’s helping combat the IPCC code red that we are faced with as of August of this year.
This push for accountability was already in motion, eco-friendly practices are a familiar part of the Aussie café experience. Plastic straws are gone; keep-cups are at most points of sale; and single use plastic bags have been eradicated. But true answerability runs deeper than that, because in the past, delivering the best quality coffee hasn’t always meant putting the environment first when it comes to coffee bags.
Packaging accounts for 3% of the coffee supply chains total carbon footprint. Foil coffee bags are partially to blame, they are multi-layered and what makes them non-recyclable is the foil. It’s fused to a thin layer of plastic. When it comes time to recycle the two cannot be separated, so it is impossible.
The coffee and planet lovers at the Little Marionette have tackled this head on and developed eco-friendly coffee bags made from Linea low density polyethylene. This means no foil lining is required, making them completely recyclable. Through the RedCycle Programme, the bags are used and then repurposed into a multitude of useful things like park furniture. Find them at The Little Marionette and recycle them at the front of Coles and Woolworths stores nationwide. Easy.
All of this means that when you visit the Little Marionette, you’re seeing a holistic approach to sustainability, their Truly Eco coffee cups were also the first plastic-free cups in Australia that can be recycled or composted. Impressive.
The Little Marionette didn’t stop there, they also teamed up with C2Zero to stop the world’s big polluters. If you head to their roastery and espresso bar in Rozelle and buy a coffee, you’ll see the cup features the C2Zero brandmark. Those cups have 450g of emissions allowances attached to each one. Emissions allowances are like ‘permission slips’ for big polluters. They need this kind of permission to keep polluting on a mind-blowing scale. Instead of using them to pollute, C2Zero locks those emissions allowances away in a virtual carbon vault – CEDO – where they can never be used by big polluters. Or anyone, ever. Incredible.
All you need to do if you are holding a specially marked cup is scan the digital fingerprint at scan. c2zero.netto, claim your carbon and enjoy every sip.
