Solid Waste & Recycling

 When it comes to a solid waste and recycling program, our first commitment has been to capitalize on all opportunities to “precycle”.  By encouraging the use of ceramics & glass  for all in-house beverages, we have been able to reduce our footprint significantly while at the same time enhancing the consumers' beverage experience.

Other focus areas have been in our food program and in various in-house syrups that we make to enhance the beverages.  Traditional cafes tend to utilize prepared coffee syrups that are from single use bottles. By producing syrups in-house we eliminate all packaging and shipping while being able to serve a superior final product.

Next to coffee, our number one consumable item is milk. We have partnered with our supplier for reusable gallon milk containers, eliminating a significant amount of waste going to the landfill.

We have focused on our supply lines to purchase as much as possible in bulk, limiting suppliers, packaging and deliveries. This has improved efficiency and reduced costs and our carbon foot print. 

As we begin to transition to the next stage of the COVID pandemic, we are committing to our environment by transitioning our packaging to tree-free, post-consumer-waste compostable cups, lids and straws from World Centric. We had planned to be fully committed to this packaging by September 2021 for all consumables. However, because of international supply chain issues, we are going to miss that September goal to transition all items. We have already transitioned 2 of our 4 paper cups & lids (90% of our packaging usage), 2 of our 3 plastic cup sizes (95% of packaging usage), and paper straws.  We are focused on transitioning to a new clam shell packaging for our to-go waffles and compostable knives and forks.

We are also committed to transitioning to SaferChoice cleaning supplies in October, enhancing our already-recycled packaging program for these supplies.