Our
Coffee
Bags
The search for a truly earth-friendly solution
Since we started roasting our own coffee, we’ve been searching for an honest, eco-friendly solution for our coffee bags.
Being based in Newquay, Cornwall, we see the impacts of poorly managed waste firsthand. Finding single-use plastic wash up on our beaches, polluting our oceans and poisoning the local wildlife, troubles us deeply.
We order thousands of bags at a time and believe we are duty-bound to find packaging that maintains the freshness and quality of our coffees without sending tons of waste to landfill every year.
As you can imagine, this quest can be a bit of a rabbit hole and there is plenty of “greenwashing” going around…
Why not just use recyclable bags?
According to government food trading standards, packaging such as coffee bags must contain an internal food grade liner to promote freshness and guard against contamination. While this is of course understandable, it does ultimately require us to use some form of plastic.
In January 2022, it was concluded that humanity has exceeded the ‘safe’ operating zone for environmental pollutants, including plastics.
Some manufacturers may try to convince you that the recyclability of plastic is its strength; however, this claim is weak. Even the purest clear plastic can only be recycled a few times, and many forms of plastic aren’t recyclable at all.
On top of this, according to the OECD, “Less than 10% of the plastic used around the world is actually recycled”. Even plastic sent through the recycling system can eventually find itself sent to foreign landfills or incinerated. Small plastic bags (such as coffee bags) are also notoriously difficult to manage in the recycling system.
Because of this, we believed we needed a better, long-term solution for our packaging…
Home Compostable
Compostable packaging is a really exciting prospect for anyone in the retail industry. Unfortunately, we’ve found that most compostable packing is actually only commercially compostable. This means that you would somehow have to get your waste to a “commercial composting facility” where they have specialist equipment, reaching extremely high temperatures, to break down the packaging. This simply isn’t possible for the average customer.
Our new bags and labels however, are certified home compostable. Specifically, they are “TUV OK Home Compostable”. This is the gold standard certification when it comes to eco-friendly packaging. In a well-managed compost heap, our bags should break down into organic biomass quicker than your banana skins!
The main bulk of the bags and labels are made from a simple compostable Kraft paper. The food-grade internal liners and one-way valves are made from Polylactic Acid (PLA).
PLA is a thermoplastic monomer derived from renewable, organic sources such as corn starch or sugar cane.
As always, we love to hear feedback from our customers. How are you getting on with the bags? Are they breaking down as they should? How quickly do they break down? Feedback helps us all to be better and do better for this planet we call home!
