Back in the 80s (remember the 80s?) I used to scoot around town on a Honda Elite 250. Why? Well… ’cause it was easy on the pocketbook and got me where I wanted to go.

Fast forward 20 years and I’m scootin’ again. Why? Same reasons, really. Sure, it’s environmentally friendly. But honestly, that’s a bonus. (A good bonus, mind you.) At 60-70 miles a gallon, I’m digging the fact that it costs me less then 15 bucks to fill-up.

And the bit about it being a hoot to ride… well, that’s got nothing to do with it. Nope. Nothing at all.

Bonus!

Scootering has a history in the Cadmus clan. That’s my dad on the right, my uncle George on the left.

“The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

“The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.”

Let’s make sure we’re  perfectly clear on this. After years of foot-dragging on the part of the Environmental Protection Agency, the frickin’ Supreme Court orders the EPA to fish or cut bait, by making an agency-level determination whether greenhouse gases are, or are not, dangerous to our health and environment. Having exhausted its available “do-nothing” options, the EPA finally, reluctantly, sends its court-ordered findings to the White House where the Bush administration — in a fit of pique that would rival a three-year-old stickin’ his fingers in his ears and squealing “I can’t hear you!”  — refuses to open the email.

This, my friends, is your government at work.

January 20, 2009 cannot arrive quickly enough.

• Hat tip: to Making Light, which you may want to visit to see the fireworks that occur in response to this development.
• Update: Don’t miss the fun conversation happening over at Scalzi’s place, where the trolls are in full throat and Scalzi’s whackin’ em like so many moles in an arcade game.

But let’s be honest… running a successful and (ideally) profitable coffee house is something of a high-wire act at the best of times. And — economically-speaking — these aren’t the best of times. You’ve got a budget to watch; a creeping expense column can throw things out of kilter. Fast. It’s not going to do you or your environmentally-minded customers any good for you to bankrupt yourself in the name of ecology.

That said, there are savings to be found in running a more efficient and sustainable coffee house, coffee shop or espresso bar. Some of these savings can be realized pretty quickly, others require a longer view. If you can, don’t just consider today’s bottom line, but tomorrow’s. And next year’s. And — for goodness sake — don’t lose sight of the ultimate bottom line here… the planet’s climate is in crisis. And it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that the viability of specialty coffee is at the forefront of that crisis.

In greening up your coffee house, there are (at least) three distinct areas where you can bring your efforts to bear: reducing energy, increasing sustainability, and making it easier for your customers to go green, too. We’ll look at each in turn. There’s a lot to slog through here, so I’ll get right to it.

Reduce energy.

A coffee shop is an energy sink. You’ve got lots of things to keep hot, things to keep cool, and excruciatingly specialized equipment to get them all mixed together. Where do you begin?

Start with an energy audit. Chances are your power company will audit your business at no charge, and provide you with a fairly comprehensive list of recommendations. It’s a great place to start… and an ideal way to benchmark where your business stands, right now. You’ll want that baseline to measure against after you’ve made some improvements.

While your power company will have lots of tips for you in terms of properly insulating your space (ceilings, walls, windows, doors) and savings you might achieve in terms of lighting (switching to CFL fixtures) and the like, chances are they won’t know enough about your specialized equipment — say, espresso machines — to tell you the whole story. You can augment what you learn on an audit report by using a portable or panel-installed power use monitor (think Kill-A-Watt and the like) to measure how much energy your specialized equipment consumes.

You’ll find your coffee house has any number of power-sucking commercial appliances. You’ll probably learn which of these costs you the most to operate in the course of your energy audit; you may not learn, however, which are the most efficient… or more importantly, which aren’t. Lacking any information to the contrary, here’s where you might want to start.

• Dishwashers. You probably know you can save energy and water by running your dishwasher only with a full load. (Of course you do!) You may not know that if you invest in an Energy Star rated commercial dishwasher you can see a pretty immediate return on your investment. An efficient dishwasher can save your coffee house up to 90 MBtus, (about $850 a year on your energy bill) and 52,000 gallons of water (probably another $200 a year).¹
• Refrigerators and freezers. Today’s Energy Star rated chill chests are as much as 35% more efficient² than the bog standard item of the last 10 years, due to advances in compressor and fan-motor efficiency and new anti-sweat technologies (’cause nobody likes a sweaty fridge.) Your new refrigerator can pay for itself in a little more than a year.
• Espresso machines and brewers. In a great many cases, you can insulate the boilers of your always-on equipment (much like you’ve insulated your shop’s hot water heater, right? Right?) Mind you, if you don’t know the internals of your brewers like the back of your hand, it’s probably best to have it done by your service-tech. A flaming espresso machine is decidedly not eco-friendly; we’re probably talking about kevlar, not simple fiberglass batting.
• Coffee roasters. Clean, clean, clean! A clean roaster is not only a safe roaster, it’s also far more efficient than one that’s choked up with years of coffee oils, a creosote-filled exhaust and clogged air vents. You may be surprised with the energy savings you realize.

So maybe it’s not in your budget to spring for new, high-efficiency appliances this year… there’s no reason you can’t make sure the appliances you have are operating at peak performance. Clean your fridge’s evaporators, condensers, and heat-exchange coils. Replace worn and leaky door seals. Better still, get a regular service regimen going so that all of your equipment is operating well throughout the year.

Increase sustainability.

Greening up entails more than just curbing your shop’s power demands. It’s also about breaking some bad habits, many of them having to do with things we simply throw away. After decades of disposable everything, we’ve become conspicuous consumers of our limited natural resources. And it’s got to stop.

• Enough with the plastic cold cups already. Bio-polymer alternatives biodegrade in commercial composting landfills inside a month; plastics are forever. Greenware cups from Fabri-Kal make petroleum-based plastic cold cups obsolete.
• Nix those unrecyclable paper hot cups. Look into compostable paper cups like the ecotainer from International Paper, lined with a corn-polymer resin that’s compostable and will degrade over time.
• Still double-cupping? Just stop, already. Please. Products like the Java Jacket are pretty much de rigeur and new biodegradable entrants like the ecoSleeve appear to work just as well for cold cups, too.
• Want to take a really big step? Consider getting rid of disposables altogether!
• Recycle! How many gallons of milk does your coffee house consumer every day, and how many plastic jugs do you empty as a result? If you’re not recycling, that adds up to a heaping pile of forever in a landfill. Recycle your consumables. More, make it easy — like, really easy — for your customers to do the same.
• Use green cleaning products. Green cleaning agents are safer for your employees to use, and they typically don’t contain any VOCs (volatile organic compounds).³ Check with the Green Restaurant Association for a list of endorsed products.
• Buy food locally. When you purchase locally grown foodstuffs, suddenly all of your customers are localvores. More to the point, locally produced milk, fruits and vegetables are fresher, taste better, and your dollars support your own community (rather than some faceless transnational food cartel.)

Make it easier for your customers to go green, too.

People are waking up — finally! — to the stark realities of global climate change. And increasingly, folks the world over want to do something about it. People are setting back their thermostats, choosing cars with better gas mileage, replacing their light bulbs — all the while looking for opportunities to do more. You can help.

• Offer organics. By all means, start by offering a selection of great organic coffees. More, make an organic coffee your house blend; your standard espresso. But don’t stop there! Look for local, organic milk and dairy suppliers, bakers and folks who farm great produce. Make organic an every day thing.
• Switch to recycled paper products. From paper towels to napkins to bath tissue, recycled paper products — no longer limited to options of “brown” and “rough” — are an increasingly compelling alternative to virgin fiber sources.
• You know and I know that folks just love those cute little bottles of water. More, we both know those little plastic bottles are just plain stupid, ecologically. So do something about it. Offer ice-cold, filtered water to refill your customer’s reusable bottles, to start.
• Encourage customers to use their own mugs. Whether you want to host a wall of customer cups for your regulars, or offer a discount for folks who drop in with their travel tumbler in-hand, get behind your customers’ efforts to green up their own lives.
• Educate your customers. Going green isn’t one of those private, hair-shirt-wearing sort of things… it’s something that you want to make some noise about. Let your customers know that you’re going green. And how. And why. By demonstrating your commitment to the environment, and by making it easy for your customers to make good choices in your place of business, you help them make greener, more sustainable choices everywhere.

Final thoughts… and an invitation.

Greening up your coffee house can save you money (in the long run, certainly, even if it may have some up-front costs). And going green can improve the morale of your staff even as it boosts the loyalty of your customers — all of them. Greening up means a safer, healthier place of business, and will ultimately lead to a safer, healthier environment. Most of all, going green is simply the right thing to do.

While I’ve thrown a lot of ideas into this article, it’s really just a start. I welcome your feedback, your ideas, and your stories about how you’re greening up your coffee house… the challenges you face, and how you overcame them. We’re in this together, after all.

I’m not the only one talking about the intersection of coffee houses and sustainability these days. See also:

• Matt Milletto’s Going Green in Your Coffee House, part 1 and part 2.
• Stewart Fritchman’s Sustainable Coffeehouse video

Notes and Links

1. Source: Energystar.gov commercial dishwasher savings guide.
2. Source: Energystar.gov commercial solid door refrigerator / freezer savings guide.
3. See Treehugger.com for more on volatile organic compounds.

It’s hard to peer into Starbucks’ notoriously opaque coffee sourcing standards. In a Sunday article in the Seattle Times — Changing the Way Costa Rican Farmers Grow Coffee – and Live — writer Manuel Valdes offers a glimpse, through the eyes of Rodrigo Vargas of Santa Eduviges — one of Costa Rica’s largest family-owned coffee-farming operations.

Vargas is one of the hundreds of farmers — large and small — in Costa Rica who have benefited from Starbucks’ arrival after an influx of cheap beans from Brazil and Vietnam saturated the market and sent prices tumbling in the late 1990s, creating a crisis for coffee growers.

As Starbucks’ presence grew in Costa Rica, Vargas’ relationship with the Seattle specialty coffee-shop chain tightened. He replaced 25 percent of his coffee plants with better breeds of arabica beans to keep up with Starbucks’ growing demand and quality standards.

By 1998, he sold 1.2 million pounds of coffee to Starbucks. In 2002, Vargas visited Seattle, met CEO Howard Schultz and sat courtside at a then-Schultz-owned Seattle Sonics basketball game.

Should you unwittingly get the impression that Starbucks’ coffee growers were all new-found members of the Seattle jet-set, chomping cigars and playing poker with Howard, the article further suggests that Starbucks still must wag the occasional disapproving finger at their naughty kids coffee suppliers…

Much like his boss, Yeiner Chacón’s life revolves around coffee. As head agronomist for Santa Eduviges, he knows coffee. He’s a fan of Café Practices, but he no longer deals with the certifiers that visit the farms.

“I almost killed the last guy,” Chacón says half-jokingly. But his attitude reflects the disagreements farmers have with the standards.

…snip…

But eventually, farmers began to see the benefits of the program.

“The plants are healthier; they produce better,” says Oscar Andres Quiros, a CoopeTarrazú member.

Well of course… it’s for their own good, after all.

But the most nettlesome quote from the entire rosy article is this beauty — a standard company talking point that is unquestioned and unrefuted by the author:

Peter Torrebiarte, Starbucks’ point man in Latin America, says any farm certified by Café Practices meets other certification-program standards, including those of Rainforest Alliance, which companies such as food conglomerate Nestlé use.

First of all, I don’t know that I’d use Nestlé as a standard for good practices in certification and corporate social responsibility. Second, the whole “one certification is as good as any other” line is tired, wrong-headed, and the basis for corporate greenwashing of the worst sort.

The article — and make no mistake, it’s a towering, sugary puff pastry — comes on the heels of Starbucks’ announcement of an expanded relationship with Conservation International, with whom it has partnered to develop a new mark for its coffee. Starbucks’ stated intent is to reinforce and expand its “Coffee and Farmer Equity” (C.A.F.E.) principles and practices.

That’s good, because those practices need some propping up. In September, 2007 the Sacramento Bee penned a stinging investigative report¹; an exposé on Starbucks’ failures to meet its own C.A.F.E. standards — standards for fair wages, environmental protection, decent housing and working conditions — in the production of one of its vaunted and pricey “Black Apron” exclusive coffees. A coffee that Starbucks offered at $26 a pound, and that put a mere 66 cents a day in the pocket of the farmers who produced it. A coffee grown on land recently deforested and replanted to better support coffee production.

My worry is that the new mark that Starbucks and Conservation International create will prove a meaningless stamp of approval; one with lots of marketing upside, and little to show for it in terms of environmental or social impact in coffee-growing communities. Starbucks has won an enviable position in the specialty coffee marketplace; they are the $12 billion gorilla in the room. With that sort of purchasing and marketing power, everything they do — unwitting or not — creates a benchmark, a measure by which all other coffee companies will be judged.

Starbucks has manufactured a great opportunity to raise the bar. I hope they’ll use it.

Notes and Links

1. Hat tip to Siel at Green LA Girl for the link

• Cuppa Joe to Go, Hold the Cup — In Edmonton, the DaCapo Caffe won’t give you a paper cup for your takeout coffee. Co-owner Antonio Bilotta, 31, says he’s tired of the waste.
  

  “I’m a cyclist and spend a lot of time in the river valley, and I see a lot of paper cups there,” he said from his university-area cafe. The last time he was at a bus stop, he glanced at the garbage can and found it full of coffee cups. He decided he wasn’t going to add to the problem. “I’m putting my foot down and that’s the way it’s going to be.”

• Circle the Wagons! — As Starbucks sets its sights on rapidly expanding its presence in St. Louis, area coffee shop owners are banding together to fight back.
  

  “We’re the neighbors” is how Craig Schubert, owner of the 1st Cup kiosk close to Chrysler’s plants in Fenton, summarizes the sales pitch. It’s based on the idea that “St. Louisans love to support the home team,” said Ben Murphy, managing partner at Applegate’s Deli & Market.

  Bloggle’s advice to the home team: it’s all about the coffee.

• Cuppa Joe, Hold the Carbon? — Starbucks has been calculating its carbon footprint, with an eye toward going on something of a diet.
  

  In its shop in downtown San Mateo, Calif., for instance, baristas serve up about 40,000 cups of coffee drinks every month. Just based on utility bills alone, that means Starbucks is serving up about 4,900 pounds of carbon with its drinks–or about two ounces per cup.

  I wonder… does that include a paper cup?

That’s gotta hurt.

Starbucks dumps its PR firm after a survey of 8,000 consumers says the coffee behemoth is “arrogant, intrusive and self-centred.”

Here’s hoping that Starbucks’ efforts to recast itself as a more socially and environmentally conscious organization are more than skin [scales?] deep. Given their stature, Starbucks could have a bigger impact than anyone to inform and educate the consumer, and to spur the specialty coffee trade.