Green Cafes

The Project

The Green Cafes project saw us work one-to-one with 21 cafes in Ocean Grove, with the goal to reduce their environmental impacts and engage with their customers on waste reduction. The program ran from April 2020 to June 2021, and was unfortunately significantly impacted by the effects of COVID-19 lockdowns.

Australia uses one billion takeaway coffee cups each year. The vast majority of takeaway coffee cups are not recyclable and those that are recyclable are not recyclable through our household services. Some are compostable but these cups can only be composted at commercial composting services (not in the home). So most takeaway coffee cups end up in landfill.

Geelong Sustainability worked with cafés in Ocean Grove and Geelong to help cafes reduce their waste by:

  1. Sending all food and compostable waste to organic waste collection services. 
  2. Providing incentives to customers who BYO a reusable cup.
  3. Sell and promote reusable cups for takeaway coffee.
  4. Avoiding disposable plastics where possible, such as straws, take-away packaging and plastic bags.
  5. Recycling as much as possible – separating paper and cardboard, soft plastics, polystyrene, pallets and crates.
  6. Having their used cooking oil collected for recycling.
  7. Reducing the energy consumption in their café and using renewable energy sources
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The Results

We found that, while COVID-19 presented its own challenges within the hospitality sector, such as the temporary ban on reusable cups, there are other barriers which businesses face when it comes to waste reduction. From a financial perspective it costs businesses more money to recycle and compost than it does to simply put all waste into a landfill stream. This seems to be an issue with infrastructure available to businesses, and we empathise with them around the financial barrier, particularly in the uncertain time of lockdowns.

There is also a time barrier for small business owners. The ability to engage with non-essential work is limited by the more immediate needs, like running the business day-to-day, ordering stock, and managing staff.

Even though we faced significant challenges in delivering this project, we are still proud of the outcomes. We learned important lessons around the best way to engage with busy businesses, and there were still positive environmental outcomes for some cafes. One cafe reported a reduction in landfill of 1,560kg that was transferred into an organics stream collection. This alone has an impact of 10,920kg CO2e emissions reduction. Soft plastics collection was also introduced to cafes, helping further divert plastics from landfill.