SUSTAINABILITY?
By: Taylor Mork - Crop to Cup
It is easy to be green these days. It seems like everybody is doing it. As consumers look to purchase more and more green products, terms such as sustainable and
green have quickly become diluted, swallowed up by opportunistic businesses and spit back out in catch-all marketing campaigns. Entrepreneur beware: a misstep in the green direction could prove a mistake for not only the people and planet behind your product, but also for your bottom-line. Many seemingly simple solutions are often plagued by the inability to make real, lasting change in the right direction.
Working as a small business manager for Crop to Cup, a farmer-focused coffee importer and wholesaler, I’ve come across more than a few potential pitfalls of what we often think of as sustainable practices. Working with farmers in East Africa, shipping 20-ton containers of coffee halfway around the world, roasting and packaging coffee, the sustainability decisions are varied and often tough. This is especially true for small business owners who may not always have the necessary cash flow to choose sustainable when sustainable is more expensive than conventional.
QUALITY VS. SUSTAINABILITY
When my partner and I first jumped into the coffee industry in Uganda, we had hopes of developing a -roasted in Uganda- product to allow Ugandan industry to benefit from value-added markups (in the coffee industry, the greatest markup usually goes to the roaster). In addition, decreased production costs in Uganda would have generated a far better margin for our company. Quickly, however, we learned that this would in fact render the product less sustainable because it would have forced Ugandan agriculture (coffee farmers) and Ugandan raw-processing industry (hulling and sorting of coffee beans before roasting) to invest in a product that would not sell in a quality-focused (fresh roasted) coffee market in the U.S. Hence, the two business partners fresh from the nonprofit community-development world were introduced to the quality-sustainability debate. Luckily, over time, we have found ways (and are still learning how) to achieve both quality and sustainability. It can surely be done; it simply requires a longer term vision and a detailed assessment of a wide array of factors.
PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE
Green decisions are often knee-jerk reactions, fueled by our desire to move swiftly away from products like plastic, timber or items shipped from afar. A thorn in the side of coffee and related industries is the issue of service items like cups, bags and cutlery. Without the capital and purchase quantities to invest in the development of alternative
sustainable products, small cafes, restaurants, and offices often find themselves choosing service items made of bioplastics and PLA-lined cups instead of the same old plastic and paper cups that we have known for so long. The problem here is that most of these new
bio products will not biodegrade in landfills (i.e. if you throw them in the regular trash) and that they can only be properly composted in a high-heat commercial composting facility. In addition, they can damage existing recycling efforts when mixed in with disposal of conventional PET plastics. So, while bioplastics take less fossil fuel to produce than do conventional plastics, the extra cost to buy and extra effort required to properly dispose of these new
green products usually renders these decisions poor for a companys bottom line and little, if any change, for our planet.
Although 5 years from now we may have developed the technologies to finally realize truly sustainable bioplastic options, bioplastics today are an example of how sounding green may not always act green. The same goes for many other green products: before you make a business decision on product alternatives, make sure to take into account how the product is produced, how it is used, how long before it needs to be replaced, and how it is disposed.
CERTIFICATIONS
Certification systems such as Fair-Trade or USDA-organic for consumer goods like coffee are valuable systems that have resulted in unprecedented benefit for some of the worlds poorest producers and our fragile natural environment. But are these certifications, essentially labels on your products or systems that communicate specific messages to current and potential customers, the answer for your business now? Social entrepreneurs are some of the most creative people out there, and can often build more effective social and environmental programs by tailoring their supply chains and daily operations to their specific products, supplier communities, customer communities and a host of other factors.
At Crop to Cup, our goal is to connect coffee farmers and coffee drinkers, and connect coffee farmers to markups on their product even during its roasting and distribution stages. We call this our
20, 5, 10 program, by which we pay farmers 20% over market price for their coffee (a quality-based bonus), 5% of our revenue (each customer's transaction is tied to specific investments in farmer communities) and 10% of our company profits (farmers have interest in continued partnership with C2C). You can learn more about this program on our
website. While Fair-trade would have provided us with a sound base of farmer payment for harvested coffee as we started up, not only did we and our coffees farming communities not have the capital to pay for farm certification, but we also did not feel that it truly encompassed the vision and principles of our company and larger motive for starting up. We felt that we could bring even higher farmer payments by implementing a tailored model. Ensuring we have the transparency to properly explain this alternative model to stakeholders, this approach now provides farmers with higher payments, an improved company bottom-line and happy customers by bringing them directly into the fold.
The same holds true for other certifications such as organic for food, body care and clothing, or LEED for buildings. As a social entrepreneur, do you have an idea that performs better than such certifications, or avoids some of the drawbacks such as increased costs or the drive towards fulfilling the bare minimum?
CORE PRINCIPLES
Do you not want to be known for your inability to drive sustainability? Remember that as
green entrepreneurs and small business managers we have to manage both bottom lines and our social and environmental responsibilities. The vast majority of us are not blessed with massive amounts of startup cash, so, it is understandable that the
green choice may not always be affordable. Growing business with this in mind, it is important that entrepreneurs have a core set of sustainability principles that form the foundation of every customer transaction, for if the product/service itself is not sustainable, then it is of no use to simply adopt sustainable back-end operations such as green office supplies. At Crop to Cup, our transaction-based sustainability is represented by our
20, 5, 10 program. From there we aim to slowly grow and make green decisions in other areas of our business (for example, supplies, packaging, delivery, etc) as they become affordable and thus sustainable from a business perspective. When an option is not affordable, then our green duty is to provide clear feedback to the suppliers who were priced out. Over time, enough feedback like this will trickle down to vendors and producers and result in the critical mass to drive both sustainable and affordable products and services.
In the meantime, keep your sustainability focus on the core principles of your daily customer transactions. Green we can achieve, by transparently communicating to stakeholders that you tailor your organization to deliver quality product and services, answer to the specific needs of individual producer and consumer communities and consider the life-cycle of your actions.
