Swag bags : How we saved over ten thousand coffee bags from landfill last year
Swag bags : How we saved over ten thousand coffee bags from landfill last year
Madding Crowd Coffee is Australia’s first roastery to generate zero packaging waste…
When we talk about waste and sustainability in the coffee industry, the conversation usually centres on the enormous waste generated by take-away coffee cups. Which is a problem steering over a billion single-use cups into landfill every year in Australia alone. It’s also a problem with some reasonable solutions that experts invariably agree on, the vast majority of which depend on the widespread adoption of reusable products, like those produced by KeepCup or Pottery for the Planet. One reason why the impact of these particular single-use products is so impactful, has to do with the sheer size of the coffee industry itself. That is to say, how we choose to consume coffee has a much larger waste footprint than how we consume almost any other product. As a point of comparison, consumers in Australia drink more coffee than any other beverage, including beer, soft drinks and bottled water.
For this very reason, the problem doesn’t stop at single-use coffee cups. The coffee industry is full of green washed, single-use products that pile up in the background without us ever even noticing. Consider, for instance, how coffee beans are stored and kept fresh at a café. The average coffee shop grinds through about 25kgs of coffee a week. In most cases, each of these kilograms is packaged and stored in a single-use bag made from 25 grams of plastic. That’s more than 32 kilograms of plastic a year, the overwhelming majority of which quickly finds its way into landfill. Of course many packaging companies are marketing bio-plastics and recyclable materials as the final solution to this mounting problem. The simple reality, however, seems to be that single-use packaging, regardless of how it’s made, does not offer us a sustainable solution (watch the video below to find out more).
When we started Madding Crowd Coffee in 2018, we quickly discovered these significant flaws in single-use, compostable and recyclable packaging. We also discovered an astounding lack of practical, environmental alternatives. Many roasters were delivering coffee in reusable tins and plastic tubs, enabling them to reduce packaging waste within a localised area. Due to storage and delivery limitations, however, these tins and tubs could not be exploited in a majority of café settings, meaning coffee companies could not conceivably eliminate single-use packaging from their wholesale coffee operations. So, we invented something new.
single-use packaging, regardless of how it’s made, does not offer us a sustainable solution
The Swag Bag was developed as a genuine solution to single-use packaging waste in the wholesale coffee industry. With a similar design principle to dry-bags, they have a foldable seal that allows us to squash oxygen out of the bag and two flat-felled seams that enable carbon dioxide to escape the bag as the coffee out-gases inside (just like the one-way valve on a disposable coffee bag). Unlike coffee tins, Swag-Bags allow us to fully remove ambient oxygen during the packing process, while the natural diffusion of volatile gases produces positive pressure inside the sealed bag and prevents oxygen from re-entering. What’s more, this design feature presents a considerable advantage over conventional, single-use coffee bags, which often produce an irksome variation between kilos as the gas content of a batch jumps drastically between each fresh bag. This results in baristas having to make grind adjustments each time a new bag is opened. Swag Bags, on the other hand, produce a slower, more seamless rate of diffusion throughout the batch, reducing wastage and creating greater consistency between cups.
Essentially, Swag Bags solve the array of storage, delivery and logistical issues that would otherwise prevent us from removing single-use packaging from our wholesale operation. In a nutshell, Swag-Bags produce zero waste and prevent significant volumes of plastic from ever reaching landfill. When it comes to Co2, our manufacturing produces a fixed and comparatively minimal carbon footprint compared to single-use packaging of any kind. Simply put, the fact that Swag Bags can be reused hundreds of times across any café setting means their carbon footprint can be reduced to almost nothing per use.
So far, with the help of swag bags our humble roastery is saving over 300 kilograms of plastic from landfill every year. If you’d like to support a more sustainable approach to specialty coffee, grab a reusable coffee cup and visit any of our café partners, every one of which uses Swag Bags to receive and store their coffee.