Our Footprint
We purchase shade-grown, certified organic, and sustainably produced coffee. We also cultivate and maintain close, personal relationships with coffee farmers, but real environmental sustainability doesn't end with the coffee we buy. We hold our grower partners and their farms to high standards and we know that we must set high standards for ourselves, too. We continually investigate our operations in the United States so that we, too, keep improving our business and reducing our environmental footprint.
Some examples of projects that we have undertaken in the past year:
- Since January of 2007, we have begun a comprehensive recycling program at our Durham roastery and training center, and we are working to implement the same standards in more training centers by the end of 2008.
- A member of the Piedmont Biofuels Cooperative, we have increased the percentage of biofuels we use in local deliveries by 200 percent.
- We reduced our use of cardboard boxes in local delivery by replacing them with reusable plastic totes.
- We reduced energy consumption at the roastery per pound of coffee sold by 10 percent and we intend to reduce it an additional 25 percent by the end of 2008.
- We reuse the plastic backing from bag label stickers as packing material for web orders, reducing the amount of paper packing material required to ship orders without damage.
- Over three months in the summer of 2008, we achieved a reduction of 2,000 car commuter miles at our Durham headquarters by encouraging alternative transportation and carpooling among staff members. The progress continues through our "Mile Reduction Challenge," which tracks the commuter miles we save each day and helps us set goals for the future.
