Environmental Policy

At But First Coffee we are passionate about the environment and want to do our best as a business to minimise our environmental impact. It is one of our 3 core values to ‘promote and supply sustainable, environmentally friendly products to the coffee industry with the goal of eradicating single-use products and reducing the environmental impact of the coffee industry.’

Here are the 4 key things we are doing:

  • Carbon credits with CarbonClick
  • Advocating for reusable coffee cups
  • Enabling repair instead of replace
  • Plastic free packaging.

 

CARBON CREDITS WITH CARBONCLICK

We've teamed up with CarbonClick, a kiwi company making it easy for people and businesses to help fight climate change. CarbonClick is the ability at our check out for customers to offset the carbon emissions of the product they are purchasing and the transport of it.

For information on But First Coffee + CarbonClick, click here.

 

ADVOCATES FOR REUSABLE COFFEE CUPS

Since day one, Nate and Brad have been advocates for reusable coffee cups. Our goal, is that But First Coffee would prevent 1 million disposable cups from ending up in our countries landfills. We have a super nerdy spreadsheet that we use to track our progress and our total number of cups saved to date is proudly displayed on our homepage.

We also have a really cool page on our website where you can calculate your impact. You add in how many takeaway coffees you get per day and it can tell you how many cups you are saving with a reusable coffee cup OR how many disposable cups you are sending to landfill every year. We also added an even cooler feature where you can see how many $$ a reusable cup can save you buy taking advantage of cafes who offer either discounts for using your own cup. Track your impact with our Takeaway Cup Calculator

We are also proud to partner with UYO, New Zealand’s online directory to cafe’s doing good for the environment. Check them out here!

 

REPAIR NOT REPLACE

A step to reducing anyones environmental impact is to choose to repair rather than replace. We have led the way in carrying replacement parts for the ever popular AeroPress Coffee Maker and for the range of JOCO Cups. We are currently the only retailer in NZ who will provide you a replacement for your lost JOCO lid!

We have been blown away by the uptake and we hope to continue to grow our offering of replacement parts.

Our range of replacement parts are available here. Can't find what you need? Contact us and we will do our best to help!

 

PACKAGING

In December 2019 we achieved the goal of having entirely paper/cardboard based packaging when we finally found a paper based tape that would actually work! We have always used cardboard boxes and paper packing in place of plastic courier bags or bubble wrap but to finally be able to ditch the plastic packaging tape was a huge day for us at But First Coffee!

We diligently sort, reuse or recycle all packaging that comes into our warehouse. Spent compostable packaging finds its way into Brad’s home composting bin.

We are unable to control the packaging inside the product boxes but we are actively encouraging our suppliers and manufacturers to improve their packaging to be more sustainable and plastic free.

If you have any suggestions on how we could do better or just to say hi, please feel free to contact us.

 

RECYCLING TIPS

All of But First Coffee’s packaging is paper or cardboard. Please consider reusing our packaging before recycling. Paper and cardboard can be recycled in any commercial or residential paper/cardboard recycling, or shredded for composting.

Product packaging can sometimes consist of the following which can be recycled at the locations: