Get Carried Away with Excelso

WORDS VICKI RAVLICH-HORAN

As anyone who tries to be waste free will attest, it is hard work. If you add to the load running a small business, you can see why many businesses let things slip. They have good intentions but just add it to the too hard basket.

Yet, as Carrie Evans from Excelso says, “There has to be some benefits to running your own business, and making a difference is a big one.” Excelso have just launched their new reusable bags made from the sacking their green coffee beans arrive in.

These stylish, one of a kind bags are just the latest in a long line of initiatives Excelso have in place to lessen their impact on the environment as well as help others do the same. You might think the fact the beans come in jute sacking, not plastic bags, is a great thing but as Carrie points out “these are still waste. Once the beans are emptied we were left with the sacking. We didn’t want these to go to landfill.”

The bags are made by Carrie in her “sweat shop”, aka her garage along with the nifty aprons and cushions you can see and buy at Excelso’s Roastery on Third Ave. Last year she recycled 150 coffee sacks, with the money raised from the sale of the bags and aprons going to the Good Trust and their great work bringing fresh drinking water to villages in Cambodia.

Not satisfied with reusing their own packaging waste, Excelso also reuse the empty boxes from neighbours, Vetro, to repack and ship customer orders in. Pallets are picked up by customers to be reused, recycled and upcycled along with the coffee grounds and chaff from roasting the coffee beans to be used on gardens and in compost. You can find tips on how to use coffee grinds and chaff on their website.

While being ‘green’ has always been part of Excelso’s ethos, a couple of years ago they kicked things up a notch. Daughter Josie, who grew up in the business, started to look more closely at their waste and carefully implemented a number of changes. First up was a switch to compostable takeaway cups. The next step was to encourage people to start using reusable cups. In the first two years they sold over 400 keep cups to customers. Now over a third of the coffees sold from their roastery are served in a reusable cup.

If you are keen to see how your business could do better, Carrie and Josie suggest getting in contact with your local council to get a ‘waste audit’. “That's how we started,” says Carrie. “Marty from Why Waste (who was contracted to the council at that time) came to our premises and went through all our rubbish and waste and taught us what to recycle/compost/reuse and how to reduce. Having an audit done really helps and gives incentive to see how much waste you are diverting from the land fill.”

Excelso Coffee 112 Third Ave West, Tauranga www.excelso.co.nz

Every bag of Excelso’s Good Coffee (which also Fair Trade and organic) gives one person access to clean drinking water. Via this partnership, Excelso customers have helped us to provide 2,352 people with clean drinking water for life in Cambodia.