Our strategy
Our environmental strategy is based on our Gold Standard commitments to:
Understand our impact: We seek to understand the positive & negative environmental impacts of all aspects of our supply chain, from grower to consumer.
We’ve invested most of our time in understanding the carbon footprint of our supply chain. You can read more about this work here. 
Work proactively through our direct relationships with smallholder farmers: We encourage environmentally sustainable production, support the positive impact farmers can have on the environment and strengthen their ability to adapt to climate change.
Our key focus here has been supporting the producers we work with to adapt to the effects of climate change. We pioneered a project on this with GIZ between 2007 – 2010, and you can read more about that on the project’s own website here. We’re also investing in a project for coffee farmers to fund adaptation through selling carbon credits. Read more here on our reforestation project with CEPICAFE.
Collaborate with our partners who process our products: We collaborate & use our influence to incentivise the highest environmental performance and to spur innovation.
We choose our partners carefully, ensuring that they too live up to our Gold Standard principles. We also gather environmental impact information from each of them on an annual basis and do what we can to support them to improve continually.
Encourage responsible consumption: We use our business model to encourage responsible consumption.
Energy use: We remind those consumers who drink our products at home to ‘boil better’ by only using the amount of water they need. We also have an ongoing partnership with Ecotricity, a UK renewable energy company, offering our Friends of Cafedirect discounted renewable energy so they can power their entire home (and not just their kettle) with green electricity. For consumers who drink our products in local workplaces, Uni’s or other out-of-home venues, we’re creating a brand new Eco-Toolkit to support those venues to reduce the environmental impacts of preparing our hot drinks. This kit covers energy, water, waste & procurement practices. You can read more about it here.
Waste: We’ve working to reduce the overall amount of packaging we use, and to make 100% of it easily recyclable or compostable by the end of 2012. Read more here.
Manage the impacts under our control: We take full responsibility to measure and reduce the negative impacts under our control.
With a small office of around 30 people, the impacts we control directly are minimal. They include emissions from all our transport, the energy used by our office, the paper we consume & the waste we produce. We recycle & compost all the office waste we can (yes, including all the coffee grounds and teabags we go through!), we only print when necessary (and double-sided at that) & we’ve set an energy use reduction target. All of that said, these impacts are minimal relative to other parts of our supply chain, so we put most of our energy into the bigger impacts above.
You can read more about our strategy here, download 2010-2012 strategy.