Keep Cups, Coffee Farmers and Sustainability

We don’t use Keep Cups at Coffee DRs (yes, you heard that right). And we get a lot of worried looks from new customers when they first hear this from us. We get it. We really do. You care about the environment, you care about sustainability and you care about doing your part. We applaud you, and salute you. Because we do, too.

The thing is that Keep Cups, coffee farmers and sustainability… they just don’t really work together. At least not for us. Here’s why. 

Keep Cups, Coffee Farmers and Sustainability

Our Cause is Coffee Sustainability

At Coffee DRs our cause is coffee sustainability. 80% of all the coffee you drink is produced by smallholders. And it takes 25 million of them to meet the global demand. But most of them aren’t making a living income. Fairtrade International reports that as of 2019, small coffee producers receive less than $1.00 a pound (or $2.20 per kilo) for their beans. And many of them are in debt to larger cooperatives which forces them to keep producing coffee beans at a loss.

When small coffee producers can’t make a living income they can’t feed their children, they can’t pay the costs of running their farm and then they simply stop growing coffee beans. They grow corn or sugar cane or something else entirely instead. And when they mortgage their farms to make ends meet, this puts them at risk for losing the farm (and their livelihood) completely. Every time a small farm is taken from coffee beans to corn, or is taken over by a larger conglomerate we lessen the diversity of the beans, create a more homogenous flavour profile and diminish the coffee industry as a whole.

But we can do something. As roasters we can make sure we’re buying beans from reputable, traceable sources that have a transparent supply chain back to the individual small holders. We can make sure that we’re paying a fair price for the beans and passing that value down to the farmers. And we can make sure that we’re spreading information about sustainability and the coffee industry to everyone that will listen (right now that’s you!).

Why Keep Cups Don’t Work

But in doing the above Keep Cups just don’t work. We’re told that reusable, well anything, is better for the environment. And in most cases that’s true. When it comes to coffee cups, however, the data is complex. The environmental impact depends on so many factors like where you live, what kind of cup it is, how you wash it and if your alternative is recyclable (see this great article in Euro News with lots of information and supporting data). This is especially true when you factor in the environmental costs of washing with soap and water and the problems associated with plastic breakdown.

However, the most interesting research when it comes to coffee cups is that what you drink coffee out of actually only accounts for 4% of its environmental impact. A whopping 73% is actually from the dairy that you put into the coffee, with the remainder coming from the other aspects of coffee production.

But at the end of the day, we don’t not use Keep Cups for any of those reasons.

Why We Don’t Use Keep Cups at Coffee DRs

At the end of the day we don’t use Keep Cups because they work against our mission of supporting small coffee farmers. You see, our goal is to maximise the amount of coffee beans that we sell so that we can maximise the amount of profits we send down the pipeline to our suppliers. In other words, the more beans we sell to you (including in brewed coffee) the more dollars end up in the pockets of our small coffee growers.

At Coffee DRs we have a system to quickly and efficiently provide you with a cup of high-quality, expertly roasted and sustainably sourced coffee. But Keep Cups (and all reusable from home containers) build inefficiencies into our systems. Our baristas have to stop what they’re doing, often wash the cup (another environmental impact) and then brew the perfect cup of coffee for a container that might be a different size than what we typically offer. Even using the many different types of cups makes it harder for them as they don’t always know how the lids work (or get them on quite right). Meanwhile our service is much slower and we sell less coffee than we might otherwise.

This isn’t about the bottom line. Supporting small farmers is the reason we do what we do. Julia’s family are coffee farmers themselves in her home country of Brazil (read about it and see pics on our About page). Her brother and uncles daily worry about whether they should keep growing coffee beans or not. A lot of the time it’s simply not sustainable. Especially when you can get a cup of coffee here in Australia or in the US or the UK for only $1. 

So, when we’re in our shop in Hornsby we understand that literally every cup of coffee and every bag of beans that we sell is directly impacting people like Julia’s brother. Every $4 cup of coffee we sell, sends a proportion of that back down the supply chain, and because of our focus on paying fair prices, we know that a bigger part of that is getting down to the growers themselves. And that’s our goal. That’s what we’re focusing on. That’s our cause. And that’s why we don’t use Keep Cups.

Our Solutions

Of course we’re always striving to be a better business, and as environmentally friendly as we can. So we’ve worked hard to ensure we have alternatives to the Keep Cup. At the moment we get our cups from BioPak, which are compostable and biodegradable. Here are also some other steps you can take to decrease the environmental impact of each cup of coffee:

• Buy your beans in our reusable tins (which have the added benefit of a valve that keeps the beans fresher for longer).

• Brew your coffee at home. The best cup for coffee is still the ceramic mug (probably the one that says ‘Best Brother’ on it) that you reuse over and over. And the most sustainable option for brewing is your home kitchen.

• Swap dairy milk for plant-based milk. This will replace your coffee cup impact 7x over.

• Compost your blue Coffee DRs cups. There are multiple places to do that in our own local area, your home compost and in Australia as a whole.

The Small Coffee Producers Win

We aren’t doing everything perfectly right, we know that. But every decision we make comes with its own impacts. And for us, right now, our focus is the smallholder farmer. If we don’t make coffee production sustainable from the source, it won’t matter what we drink it out of. Because we won’t have anything to drink anyway. So, for now, we don’t use Keep Cups. And we hope you understand.

Want to grab some beans and start brewing from home? Check out what we’ve got in our shop (and the small farmers that grew the beans!).