Coffee and Sustainability: Intro to the new EcoRate Sustainability Blog!

Welcome to the EcoRate Sustainability Blog! I’m excited to share all about EcoRate, how to use your purchasing power to help the environment, and how to instill new and sustainable habits. Through our blog posts, we’ll take a deep dive into coffee and its environmental impact. We’ll also hone our eco-BS detector to get better at distinguishing between truly eco-friendly practices and greenwashing. We’ve got tons to explore so let’s get started.

What is EcoRate?

EcoRate is a free sustainability ratings platform. You can use it to search for cafes based on how eco-friendly they are. EcoRate also lets you review the cafes that you go to for sustainability. Reviews help the next person make a more informed choice. So what makes a cafe sustainable? EcoRate focuses on how much waste cafes produce when they serve food and drinks. You can use EcoRate’s app or website, whichever works for you.

There’s a sustainability map that makes it easy to see which ones are better or worse near you. At a glance you can see if a cafe uses mugs and glasses, or if they allow BYO thermoses. It sounds simple, but many cafes use single-use cups for all their drinks these days. So a cafe can make a huge reduction in their trash footprint just by using reusables. Sustainability isn’t rocket science! A recurring theme in this blog is that reuse always wins out over trashy single-use.

Purchasing Power

One crucial aspect of EcoRate is that it lets us collaborate to reduce waste. From the perspective of you, the customer, it makes it easy to choose a low-waste cafe. With that knowledge, you can assert environmental criteria in the places you choose to go. It’s easy to cut single-use cups out of your life when you know where to go. Also, when you leave a sustainability review of a cafe, it helps us improve that info for the next person. And from the perspective of the cafe owners and barista, they finally get proper credit for the good environmental practices they use. One of the most gratifying aspects of using EcoRate is highlighting supporting the cafes that are doing the most to be low waste. Put another way, as an eco-conscientious community, we can clean up the cafe industry.

Coffee and Sustainability

Why cafes? People often ask why EcoRate only works for cafes. Eventually I will expand it to other types of venues too. I started with cafes because coffee is a borderline sacred daily ritual for many people. That means it’s a great opportunity to insert a bit of environmental intentionality. Coffee is also very easy to consume in a low waste way. Farm to table, over half of the waste produced from the coffee industry happens at the point of consumption. Coincidentally, this is also the easiest waste to cut out. Just use a mug and wash it. Easy!

Ambitious Policy or Greenwashing?

Lately, I’ve been hearing tons of big companies and even countries make bold sounding sustainability commitments. Unfortunately these mostly turn out to be greenwashing and stalling. What is greenwashing? It’s where a policy or practice is touted as a big win for the environment, but it actually has little to no benefit. In other words, eco-hype!

The problem is that you can’t be an expert in every field. That means it can be hard to properly judge sustainability claims. In this sustainability blog I’ll do my best to break down those claims for you. This analysis will be about lots of fields, not just the cafe industry. So I’ll bring domain experts to the blog as needed to separate the truth from greenwashing. There are some standout companies, public benefit corporations, and non-profits out there. Verifying their claims also means praising the ones that are doing a lot of the hard work. It’s great to see, and it happens more than you might think.

Sustainability Blog and Resources

I hope you’ll learn a lot from this sustainability blog. Please also join the EcoRate community on our waste reduction mission by using our eco-friendly cafe finder. If you do, you’ll also see that the eco-friendly cafes are nicer in every way. They’re small shops with cool baristas. Local artists’ paintings decorate the walls. Go see for yourself, and be sure to share what you find. There’s a whole community of like-minded people that want to go to those cafes too.