Eliminating single use plastics – big ideas can come from small places
Did you know that approximately 300 million single use non-recyclable foil, plastic coffee bags are being produced and discarded every year in the UK?
Our client Hej Coffee may be a relatively small kid on the big coffee block, but they have impressive aspirations as to how to tackle this very unenvironmentally friendly stat.
Introducing Ernie and the Hej Coffee Round
The Hej Coffee Round will eliminate the need for coffee packaging by delivering freshly roasted coffee in reusable containers to businesses across central London. Ernie, a 1963 original milk float, will deliver wholesale coffee orders right to your business door (or loading bay), a initiative that will start making a difference to our coffee packaging waste problem.
It’s a bit like a milk round, but much tastier and very environmentally friendly .
Vegware – better for the environment
Vegware are plant-based cups, sustainably sourced and often made from recycled card. But perhaps most importantly, Vegware cups can be commercially composted with food waste. All disposable cups at Hej Coffee outlets are Vegware cups and through this initiative Hej Coffee has saved 4.6 tonnes of carbon, 6.3 tonnes of virgin materials, 20.7 tonnes of finite resources. That’s cancelling out carbon from 8 flights from London to New York.
KeepCups
ReCUP – a product of green engineering
For those who believe in good old-fashioned recycling Hej also supply ReCUP cups. ReCUP’s use EarthCoating® to make their cups fully recyclable in conventional paper recycling systems. Understand this: Hej never use unsustainable cups for their coffee – all non-reusable cups supplied can either be recycled or composted. Now that is impressive.
Some big initiatives from a relatively small start-up
It’s a pretty impressive list of initiatives isn’t it? And to think that Hej have only been around for a couple of years and only have three cafe outlets in London. Just think of the size of the positive environmental impact if the major high street coffee outlets embraced all of these initiatives – and came up with a few more of their own!
Oh, and did you know that used coffee grounds can be turned into fertiliser pellets and soil conditioners that provide essential nutrients to plants. Just something else the people behind Hej have discovered on their coffee journey.
