Sustainability
As a buzz-word dropped everywhere these days, a lot of businesses claim to understand and be very interested in it. For this discussion, the word is best rephrased as a question: Is the activity sustainable? Can it continue over the long run? Are we fishing more out of the pond than can be reproduced?
The modern usage of Sustainability comes down to three interconnected issues: Ecological, Social, and Economical. All three must supported for any activity to be truly sustainable. Miss one leg of the three-leg table, and the table falls over. Miss the ecological, and land suffers. Miss the social and the people's quality of life deteriorate. Miss the economical, and the people cannot make a livelihood.
The problem for many industries lies in how they define success. For many, simply increasing output, keeping costs low and keeping the demand high addresses none of the ecological, social, and economical stress the industry puts on the very source of its wealth: the land and the people. Since the coffee industry is greatly dependent on the health of the land and the people that work it, it would benefit us all to define success in terms of how we are keeping our activities sustainable. That challenge is not going to be 100% in place over night.
At Café Imports we've tried to break the challenges down into smaller goals:
- We import some 20% sustainable coffees
- We are a carbon neutral company
- We print on FSC paper
- We are an organic certified warehouse
- We pay over twice the federal minimum wage for all employees, and pay full medical insurance costs
- We recycle most office waste
Are we a sustainable company? No, we are not, and neither are many large corporations who spend ten times more on marketing of their limited sustainable activities than on the activities themselves.
We are, however, actively working and moving to becoming a more sustainable company on many simultaneous fronts. Our Spectacled Bear coffee is a good example. It is not an organic coffee, or Fair Trade, but we donate money to the Wildlife Conservation Society out of our profits. Does that make the coffee now sustainable? No, but it's moving in the correct direction.
Unfortunately just buying Fair Trade or Organic coffee, while not a bad activity, does not make a company sustainable. Being sustainable makes it sustainable. For Café Imports, it is a continual road of progress. Here are some new activities we're exploring on the path to becoming even more sustainable:
- Buying only organic cotton for all our needs
- Exploring into bio diesel for our delivery trucks
- Building a environmentally friendly warehouse with geo thermal heating/cooling
- Purchasing only renewable energy.
Can we do all this today? No. Does the industry as a whole need to explore more sustainable solutions to its every day operating problems? Most definitely.
