Reducing wastefulness is by far the most impactful step towards a sustainable future filled with our favorite coffees, and it doesn’t have to be as inconvenient as you might think!

Here at Alma, we made huge moves in this department earlier this year: our new 100% recyclable mailers, for instance, reduce the amount of packaging material, transport space, and warehouse storage needed over traditional packaging boxes.

Since making the shift to recyclable mailers, we’ve already reaped the benefits of environmental sustainability through cost savings and reduced wastefulness, and this transition has helped our entire team start thinking “outside of the box” when it comes to more sustainable practices in everything we do.

#2: Reusing Waste

Finding ways to reduce coffee waste sometimes isn’t as simple as investing in recyclable mailers or investing in a double insulated coffee tumbler, and that’s where re-usability can make a huge difference.

One great example of this is in the re-use of plastic grainpro bags used to ship green bean coffee from Finca Terrerito to our Georgia roastery.

Typically, grainpro bags are discarded after a roaster cuts them open in a burlap sack to begin the roasting process; However, we found that grainpro bags are perfect for holding resting coffee that is in parchment prior to export during picking season at our family farms.

Since opening our roastery in 2019, every single grainpro bag used to seal green bean coffee at origin and subsequently shipped to our US-based roastery is shipped back down to Honduras and re-purposed in the best way possible (some of our farm team have been using the same grainpro bag for years!)

#3: Recycling Waste

Finally, we’ll talk about the last step in the sustainability process—recycling.

Recycling takes the back seat to reduction and reusability because, for lack of better words, it’s unclear just how much of a recycled product is recycled after you drop it in the iconic blue bin.

However, if you have complete transparency as to how something is being recycled, then recycling is the ideal sustainable move that businesses and consumers alike benefit from.

Although we debuted our recyclable mailers not too long ago, we forgot to mention our biggest recycling investment of 2022: the NEW café parking lot!

We worked with an amazing local company called Mullins Pavement to pave our gravel parking lot in Holly Springs, GA with recycled and re-purposed pavement, which eliminates the use of concrete mix and wasteful pavement products completely and give the broken down roads we drive on every day a second life

It might not be as sexy as our mailers, but it sets a clear precedent for other companies to follow: small sustainable investments make a huge difference in the world around this (and can be cheaper, too!). 

What can I do to make my at-home coffee more sustainable?

If you are wondering how you can reduce your own coffee waste at home, we definitely recommend evaluating your coffee habits and finding ways to reduce, reuse, or recycle waste where it makes sense—to help, we’ve laid out a few ideas below to help get your sustainability juices flowing!

If you’re wondering how you can work to recycle coffee waste at your at-home coffee bar, we highly recommend coffee-ground composting [HL]: just like our parking lot, you’ll know that composting your used coffee grounds is truly recycling 100% of wasted material. 

On top of that, recycling used coffee grounds into your garden has shown to improve vegetable yield more than traditional composted materials [HL]. Simply put—the more coffee you drink, the more you can compost, and the more you can grow in an at-home garden!

We don’t expect you to reuse the 12 oz. coffee bags in the same way we reuse 152 lb GrainPro sacks, and that’s why we’ve continually invested in making reusability as easy as possible for the Alma Coffee familia.

Our Re-Sealable Coffee Canisters were introduced around this time last year as a practical (and money-saving) alternative to traditional coffee bags. 

If you live close enough to our Holly Springs, GA warehouse and roastery, stopping in to fill up your canister every few weeks gives you 4 oz. of free coffee for every 12 oz. you buy and prevents another coffee bag from ending up at the local landfill.

Additionally, other products like coffee tumblers or re-usable K-cups  significantly reduce the amount of waste with every cup you brew, and we put a huge amount of time into making sure they look good too.

We hope this week's blog showcased not just a few of the impactful sustainable practices we've incorporate at our own roastery & warehouse, but also demonstrated just how easy it is to make a difference from your own at-home coffee bar, too!

Let us know in the comments below what sustainable initiative you'd like to see us adopt in 2023, or what you plan to do from home after reading this! If you aren't already subscribed to our email newsletter, sign up below to get notified when blogs like this or other fun coffee content is first published.