Tips for Sustainable Brewing
Small steps make up every journey. Pick one of these ways to make your coffee more eco-friendly and stick with it. Maybe add another way or two later on.
No Filter OR A Reusable Filter
While there are several ways of brewing without a filter or with a reusable one, the most compelling reason to avoid paper filters is that a large portion of them are chlorine-bleached and end up in landfills.
Reusable filters eliminate paper waste entirely, chlorine-free or not. Here are a few examples of eco-friendly brewers:
- French Press
- Stainless Steel Pour Over Cone
- Steel Filters
Coffee brewed with metal filters has a rich flavor and full mouthfeel. If not for the eco-friendly factors, try them for the flavor!
The Moka Pot!
You've read us rave about the moka pot. This little brewer is a power house - from using in the comfort of your own home to camping, this brewer is inexpensive, easy to use and makes an incredible brew.
Use Your Own Mug
Another super simple way to reduce paper waste is to use your own mug. This method doesn’t contribute to landfill crowding with paper cups, and makes you feel right at home.
For many years, Starbucks promised to make a recyclable cup, but has failed to do so. It takes about 20 years for the standard Starbucks cup to decompose. That may not sound like such a long time, but when you consider that the USA goes through 60 billion of those cups per year, the problem becomes a lot bigger.
Do the world a favor and start taking your own mugs and tumblers to coffee shops. The baristas will be glad to play a small part in reducing paper waste and you’ll feel proud of your eco-friendly coffee habit.
Brew Manually
Manual coffee brewers stand in defiance against another one of the great challenges to eco-friendly coffee: auto drip coffee makers.
If you take a stroll to your neighborhood supermarket and look at the coffeemakers, you’ll realize a couple things. Firstly, they are cheaply priced. Secondly, they are cheaply made.
These coffee pots are plastic-guzzlers that are built to break, requiring the manufacturing of more and more of them. It’s an endless cycle of wasteful manufacturing.
Manual coffee brewers, on the other hand, are simply constructed and built to last. They are made of few parts (often just one), rarely require replacing, and can serve you for decades.
Manual coffee brewing is amazing in a variety of ways, but their eco-friendly properties are one of the chief advantages (especially if they use a metal filter).
Buy From The Right People
Not all coffee roasters treat their craft with the same respect. Some carry very little about their environmental footprint. Some rigidly control their footprint with incredible precision.
I encourage you to look into the practices of your local roasters to find which ones are doing a good job of reducing, reusing, and recycling. Support the efforts of those roasters.
One roaster you can always rely on to use sustainable practices is... Call Sign!
The specialty coffees we source come from some of the best farms in the world. Not only are the quality-focused farms, they're environmentally conscious.
Several of the farms we import from are Rainforest Alliance Certified, a couple are Rainforest And Bird Friendly Certified, and they all pay empowering wages to local workers. Simply put, we're extremely proud of our eco-friendly and business-saavy producers!
If you'd like to have sustainably sourced, high-quality coffee beans roasted and sent right to you every other week, check out the our Subscription Service!
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We are all responsible for our planet and our own footprint. It doesn’t matter whether we drink one or five cups per day (like us!!), we all play a role.