SENSITIVE CONTENT
The following section contains sensitive content which some people may find offensive or disturbing.
2021
- BLUE SPARROW COFFEE -
SUSTAINABILITY BREAKDOWN
Head back to the main 2021 report here.
WASTE
We dug through our trash and found out our waste situation is sh*t.
TRASH
66%-75%
of customer waste ends up in our trash
Honestly, we would prefer more trash to bad recycling. We are anti-wish-cycling – when in doubt, toss it out! However, in the future, we hope to eliminate items that are not compostable or recyclable from our customer facing products.
RECYCLE
55%
of our customer waste is recyclable
Colorado is not great at recycling and remains one of the top 20 most wasteful states in the U.S. according to the State of Recycling and Composting in Colorado 2021 report. We’ve heard a range of numbers, anywhere from 9-70% depending who you ask, about what actually gets recycled from our recycling bins.
COMPOST
44.4%
of customer waste is currently compostable
We know composting is a great alternative to the landfill for the coffee grounds we produce making ~ 400 drinks a day. Sending grounds to be composted minimizes the production of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 84 times more potent than CO2, and other climate-warming gases associated with decomposition in landfills (our source).
While you wait for us to clean up you can study what is and isn’t recyclable in Denver here.
ENERGY CONSUMPTION
Energy use is reported as kilowatt-hour per square foot (kWh/sq. ft.) in most of the sustainability reporting we’ve read. These are pretty standard measurements that allow for an apples-to-apples comparison of different operations. We decided to make it fun and break down energy use at our Blake location a little differently, although we do have our kWh/sq. ft. reported above.
Dogs
Square Footage
Beverages
What does all of this tell us? Well, we aren’t totally sure just yet. Not many coffee shops make their energy usage publicly available. So we don’t have much to compare ourselves to. Here is one of our bills if you are interested. Send us yours and we can see how we measure up!
WATER USAGE
Water use can be challenging to accurately track in multi-use commercial settings. Right now we have no way of looking at our individual impact in the shared buildings where our stores are housed. We are working with our landlords to figure it all out. At our Platte Street location, we know our operations are using thousands of gallons a month, but don’t have much more information available to us. We did report shared water use HERE, but this is something we would like to be able to report with more confidence in the future. We will keep you updated.
