Blue Bottle Coffee is in the news this week (h/t once again to my friend Karen), as it announced that it is undertaking a series of operational changes with the goal to be zero waste by end of 2020.
The drive starts with pilots in two San Francisco Bay area shops to eliminate single use cups, which they hope to roll out throughout their entire chain.
A company blog post from their CEO announcing the changes contains some frank comments, including an admission that current efforts just aren’t cutting it:
Continue readingWe recently woke up to the fact that our beautiful bioplastic cups and straws were not being composted even though they were 100 percent compostable. Too many ended up in landfills, where they couldn’t break down at all. So we switched to paper straws and sugarcane-paper cups. But that’s still not enough. We still go through on average 15,000 disposable single-use cups per cafe per month in the US alone, which adds up to 12 million cups per year.
-Bryan Meehan, CEO, Blue Bottle Coffee