Our passion
Our Commitment and Objectives
Our family at Sustainable Cafe are passionate about everything environmentally sustainable. This document will outline aspects of Sustainable Café’s objectives to help reduce our negative impacts on our Earth’s resources and affected impacts of our activities over the long term.
Our objectives
1. Reduce our green house gas emissions. Reduce the Scope 1, 2 and 3 greenhouse gases as much as possible.
Sustainable Café will be able to reduce our scope 1 greenhouse gases easily as our electricity provider is 100% renewable. Furthermore, most travel made by Sustainable Café staff is through public transport which minimises our potential carbon footprint significantly. In terms of our scope 3 emissions, that would be the responsibility of our suppliers and the associated transport of goods. In view of that, Sustainable Café have implemented a broad sustainability audit which we ask our suppliers to fill out before we accept them on our website. Where possible, we will aggressively promote those businesses on our website which continually decrease their carbon footprint as they continue carry out their business. For example, given that shipping freight overseas and road have a much smaller carbon footprint than aeroplanes, we will ask our suppliers to use that mode of transport in line with our commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Charter.
Our objectives
2. Employ the three R’s of Reduce, Recycle and Repurpose.
For those companies that go that extra mile in sustainability within their production lines we will ask our suppliers to repurpose, recycle and reduce their waste as much as possible. For example, given that cotton farming is known to have “dirty reputation”, instead of discarding their material waste, we will suggest they shred that waste product and use it in their packaging or repurpose it to manufacture mosaic rugs rather than throw it into landfill for another generation to deal with our waste.
Our objectives
3. Partnerships with environmentally friendly suppliers and manufacturers.
Partnerships and friendships are vital for our business objectives. We aim to make meaningful partnerships with suppliers, wholesalers and retail businesses as well as NGOs and charities who share our vision of a more sustainable environment, both for the planet now and in the future as well for the next generations of humans and wildlife. Our vision is simply to leave behind “flowers” in our footsteps rather than negative footprints. To leave behind as little pollution as possible and instead to leave a legacy of a new retail culture whereby we all work to make a happier earth.
Our objectives
4. Minimise where possible plastic and non-biodegradable packaging.
Considering that Sustainable Café, do not directly manufacture or package the products we sell. Instead, we are a third person business whereby the customer buys from us and we contact the supplier to ship to the customer. In view of that, we have minimal control of how the suppliers use plastics overall. Having said that, we do choose who we partner with and aim to establish meaningful relationships with businesses that share our vision of more sustainable packaging and product ingredients. In our sustainability audit that we ask our suppliers to complete, we have included non-biodegradable waste streams/ hydrocarbons and where they use recycled or repurposed items in their manufacturing and packaging, they will score very high and so will be given a priority in our listings.
Sustainable Café’s Offerings
Discover the operations and marketing visions of Sustainable Café.
Our objectives
5. Use renewable energy providers.
Our head office electricity is exclusively provided by a renewable electricity provider. As Sustainable Café grows its business, we will continue to source our energy from the most efficient environmentally sympathetic suppliers.
Our objectives
6. Be compliant within all aspects of UK environmental legislation.
Considering that environmental legislation is as dynamic as it is, keeping up with the latest laws can be a challenge. However, we will do our very best to remain compliant with UK environmental legislation and internationally as much as possible. We will also ask our suppliers to ensure their compliance to environmental legislation remain as a very high priority in their operations.
Our objectives
7. Sell very good quality products that should not require a replacement within a year.
Waste is a big thing internationally. It has been estimated that each person on average in the UK throw away around 400kg of waste every year. Instead of being part of a throw away society and sell poor quality products that break quickly from general use, Sustainable Café will source very good quality products that do not break so easily and should have a much longer life span than less good quality products.
Our objectives
8. Sell/ market second hand/ pre loved items in line with our repurpose and reduce waste within the supply chains.
As Sustainable Café grows our business, we plan on partnerships with pre loved good shops, aka thrift stores. This is a big pillar in our business objectives in line with the R’s (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle) policy. This will maximize the life span of a product and hopefully reduce the appetite of our customers to buy new products so frequently.
