May 2011 Coffee News

-No Impact Man
-Sustainability Plan
-Coffee Bags and Carbon Offsets
-Living Green Expo

Recently a coffee customer recommended to us the book No Impact Man. With that fresh in mind and the Living Green Expo coming up this weekend (stop by to see us - details below), we make sustainability the focus of our newsletter ramblings this month.

No Impact Man
We enjoyed the mix of philosophical musings and practical advice in Colin Beavan's book No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes about Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process. His account of his family's adventures in green living in New York City is both humorous and spiritual, full of facts of our dire environmental reality yet grounded in real life examples of what we can do individually and together. The book's extensive appendix and corresponding website, blog and movie are full of resources and ideas.

His chapter "What you Think when you find your Life in the Trash, is a lesson in mindfulness that is available every time we prepare to toss something into the garbage. He writes, "If I treated the resources that pass through my hands as though they were precious, might I also begin to feel that this very life -- the one right under my feet right now and right this very moment -- might be precious too?"

Sustainability Plan
We were inspired by Beavan's experience to create a sustainability plan of sorts, capturing our current "green" practices and putting forth a few goals for the coming year. We won't list everything we jotted down, but here is a short list of some of the ways we attempt to walk more lightly on the earth and a few of our goals for the coming year.

  • Velasquez Family Coffee is shade-grown in the Comayagua National Cloud-Forest in Honduras. We just updated our website with more details about the benefits of this approach to growing coffee, complete with photos of some of our coffee plots, links to bird ecologist Julie Crave's blog Coffee and Conservation - are your beans for the bird, and an article from Dan Imhoff on Shade Coffee.
  • Velasquez Family Coffee, while not certified organic is grown without pesticides. Natural fertilizers/organic matter are used whenever possible to maintain the fertility of the soil. Weeds are controlled mostly through the use of hand labor with machetes.
  • Here in Minnesota, we have eliminated Cathy's daily commute by running our business out of our home and storing our roasted coffee at the ACE Hardware store across the street (where you can also pick up a bag of coffee if you are in the area). 
  • We reuse and recycle the cardboard boxes we get from our roaster (let us know if you or a friend are moving and we'd be happy to get boxes to you). We use scratch paper for most of our invoices and 100% recycled paper from Eureka Recycling paper coop when that isn't available. We package our monthly coffee orders in grocery bags collected from friends at our church or in rubber bands that would otherwise be thrown away.

Coffee Bags and Carbon Offsets
As No Impact Man admits, it is pretty much impossible to live without having any impact on the planet. But we are the first to acknowledge, there are several ways we know we can improve. Here are two areas that are particularly challenging for us:

Freight and delivery miles. We attempt to minimize our transportation factor by getting our coffee one time a year from Honduras and one time a month from our roaster. We consolidate most of our coffee deliveries into our second Friday of the month delivery route (currently around 150 deliveries covering about 200 miles). Mailed orders are picked up at our house by our helpful mail carrier (we highly recommend ClicknShip and Carrier Pickup from the US Post Office). And then there is the heavy carbon impact of air travel, without which we would not be able to visit the coffee farm or our family. In the coming year, we will attempt to quantify the impact of all this transportation and to research carbon offset programs that would be appropriate for us.

Non-recyclable packaging. We have asked numerous packaging folks about better options for packaging our coffee.The problem is that bio-degradable material "breathes" and that would mean stale coffee. For the time being, we are stuck with plastic coated coffee bags. But we will continue to research other options (particularly as new bioplastics become available). In the meantime, we invite you our customers to share your creative ideas for what to do with the bags other than just throw them out. Here's one we received already, "Empty coffee bags are a great deodorizer by the cat litter boxes and once the coffee scent has dissipated, recycle very well as litter clean-up bags." We'll include other suggestions in future emails.

Living Green Expo
Create your own sustainability plan for 2011. For the tenth year in a row, we'll be joining other green businesses and organizations at The Living Green Expo this weekend May 7-8 at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. We'll be in the 4-H Buillding in Aisle C (C for coffee perhaps!). Stop by and say hi and get newly inspired by the many exhibitors and workshops for a greener life.