When it comes to sav­ing the earth, you don’t need to be a super­hero. Coffee house own­ers can do it a lit­tle bit at a time. Here are a num­ber of small things five own­ers and man­agers across the coun­try are doing to help the environment.

SOUTHWEST
The Tea Exchange
Manhattan Beach, Calif.
Switching to corn-based plas­tic and post-consumer paper prod­ucts is an easy way to make a big dif­fer­ence, said Craig Boelsen, the co-owner of The Tea Exchange in Manhattan Beach, Calif.

The 1,600-square-foot shop sits two blocks from the beach in the Metlox Plaza, a new, upscale shop­ping area with mostly bou­tiques with an indie arts feel.

Though his shop spe­cial­izes in tea, they offer the full line of espresso drinks like any cof­fee house.

Switching tra­di­tional prod­ucts with earth-friendly ver­sions is some­thing any cof­fee house owner can do, says Boelsen.

Running a new busi­ness, he has no time to worry about the more involved mea­sures some entre­pre­neurs take, such as installing solar pan­els or gath­er­ing rain­wa­ter for clean­ing. “I look for things that are easy, such as chang­ing your prod­ucts,” he said.

He also buys organic pro­duce from local pro­duc­ers when­ever avail­able, he said. “We look for prod­ucts that are organic and Fair Trade,” he said.

Even though swap­ping out prod­ucts may take lit­tle to no time or energy, the effects add up, he said.

MIDWEST
Amante Coffee
Boulder, Colo.
Used cof­fee grounds make a great fer­til­izer, and Ian Short can’t stand to see it go to a land­fill. So, he pack­ages up and gives it to his cus­tomers at his 1,500-sq-ft shop, Amante Coffee, where he works as the manager.

The shop sits in an upscale, newer neigh­bor­hood full of con­dos for young pro­fes­sion­als. Across the street are an Italian restau­rant and a bike shop, he said.

When spring rolls around, cus­tomers who are get­ting ready to plant their gar­dens ask about the grounds, so he bags them and puts them on dis­play with a sign say­ing the bags are free.

“Our cus­tomers can come by and pick them up to help with their gar­den­ing,” he said. Not every­body knows what the grounds are for at first glance, he said. “Most of the time they ask, ‘What do you use this for?’” he says. When I tell them “they’re kind of intrigued.” This gives Short and his employ­ees an open­ing to talk to the cus­tomers about how you use the grounds and about Amante Coffee’s efforts to help the envi­ron­ment, which many cus­tomers are happy to hear. “We’re in Boulder, so there’s a pretty big envi­ron­men­tal push,” he says.

Other cus­tomers know exactly what to do with it. “Some cus­tomers come in every day for a week until they get enough.”

SOUTH
Crooked Tree Coffee House
Dallas, Tex.
The eas­i­est way to have a big impact on the envi­ron­ment is to know your roaster, said Sarah Momary, the co-owner of the Crooked Tree Coffeehouse in Dallas, Tex.

The three-year-old shop sits in a 100-year-old build­ing in the St. Thomas Historic District, a neigh­bor­hood of old houses, half of which still house fam­i­lies, the other half con­tain shops like hers. Crooked Tree sits on one tree-shaded road between a family’s home and an art stu­dio. The cof­fee house gets all its cof­fee from Oak Cliff Coffee Roasters, a local roaster who Momary knows well.

In turn, the head roaster at Oak Cliff knows his green bean sup­pli­ers. He reg­u­larly hops flights down to South America to see how the cof­fee is grown. There, he only buys cof­fee pro­duced by grow­ers who respect the envi­ron­ment and treat their employ­ees well. Environmentally it’s equal to Fair Trade, but with direct trade, he can see the con­di­tions of the work­ers,” Momary says. “He can see whether they’re doing good in their communities.”

This does not always help his bot­tom line, but it helps him feel he’s doing good for the world, he says. “A lot of times peo­ple just want a cup of cof­fee to go.” Nonetheless, he thinks it’s as impor­tant as turn­ing a profit. “We think it’s of utmost impor­tance. We wouldn’t be in busi­ness if we felt we were doing harm rather than good,” he says.

MIDWEST
Coffee Emporium
Cincinnati, Ohio
The rev­e­la­tion to embrace sus­tain­able prac­tices came to Tony Tausch and his wife Eileen after they opened the small­est of their four Cincinnati Coffee Emporiums in 1996. It was only 300 sq. ft. but the trash it gen­er­ated was tremen­dous, “piles and piles of garbage,” Tausch recalls.

“It really hit home and we decided then and there to do some­thing,” he says. “The first thing was to begin com­post­ing cof­fee grounds and kitchen waste. Today we col­lect 50 five-gallon buck­ets of grounds a week at our shops, enough to con­vince a local farmer to pick up the waste. “The funny thing is that today peo­ple are fight­ing over our garbage,” he says.

His early sus­tain­abil­ity prac­tices included installing pig-tailed CFLs and switch­ing to biodegrad­able, com­postable cups,” says Tausch.

The shop has since pur­chased bicy­cles and begun deliv­er­ing catered prod­ucts on wheels to reduce emis­sions. Tausch, who helps with deliv­er­ies when needed, says the mod­i­fied bikes carry 100 pounds of prod­uct and are sur­pris­ingly effi­cient. “The other day I made a down­town deliv­ery in the time it would have taken me to find a park­ing spot,” he says.

Tausch, 47, has been praised as a busi­ness leader. Several years ago he was among the first to invest in the city’s riot-torn Over the Rhine neigh­bor­hood. His shop has since earned recog­ni­tion from local press and double-digit growth.

Coffee Emporium now employs 53 with 15 full-time staff.

“Our sus­tain­able ini­tia­tives are not just an expense, it is some­thing that we feel we have to do,” says Tausch. “The earth is only so big and capa­ble of hold­ing so much. We live in a throw-away soci­ety but that shouldn’t keep us from doing some­thing about it.”

NORTHWEST
Mocha Motion
Forks, Wash.
Recycling is some­thing any­body can do, even if the near­est recy­cling facil­ity is an hour away.

Twice a month, Susie Reaume, the owner of Mocha Motion in Forks, Wash., takes a trip to Port Angeles, the near­est major city. While she’s there, she recy­cles her trash. Her load includes mostly cans of Red Bull and club soda, she says. “We just put a box in the back and as we use them, we just toss them in.”

Mocha Motion is a six-year-old drive-thru cof­fee house on the city’s main drag. In fact it’s the city’s only drag.  Forks is a town of 3,000 peo­ple in the state’s north­west­ern wilder­ness. Despite the cold and small pop­u­la­tion, she does good busi­ness she says. Much is due the hik­ers and nature lovers, though recently some of it is due to vam­pire movie fans. Forks is the set­ting for the Twilight series of vam­pire nov­els, and fans pour in by the dozens every week look­ing for land­marks men­tioned in the sto­ries, Reaume says. “It’s totally huge. People from all over the world are com­ing to be here,” she said.

Unlike most cities, she doesn’t get her recy­clables picked up from her curb. So, if she can recy­cle, any­body can, she said.

NORTHEAST
Bohemian Coffee House
Brunswick, Maine
The best way to clean up the envi­ron­ment is to waste less, accord­ing to Peter Robbins, the owner of Bohemian Coffee House in Brunswick, Maine. He sells specially-made travel cups in his shop, and he encour­ages his cus­tomers to use them instead of paper cups. “We sell huge amounts of travel cups,” he said. With each order, he changes the design to encour­age cus­tomers to buy more than one. “There are some peo­ple who have to have each one.”

He offers dis­counts to cus­tomers who bring their own mugs. For exam­ple, a cup of cof­fee on the menu for $1.93 costs only $1.35 when served in a reusable mug.

Even cus­tomers with­out a shop branded mug, will be steered toward reusable cups.

“We say, ‘It tastes a lot bet­ter in a ceramic cup. Would you rather have it in a ceramic cup?’” Robbins said.

Since Robbins began encour­ag­ing cus­tomers to use mugs, the num­ber of dis­pos­able cups he has to buy has gone way down. In 1998, for exam­ple, he went through a case per week of each size; that’s three cases a week or 3,000 cups. Now, he goes through only a case every two weeks.

It helps that many of his clients are envi­ron­men­tally con­scious. His shop sits in down­town Brunswick on the mile-long main thor­ough­fare near Bowdoin College. The build­ing is stand-alone in the park­ing lot of a super­mar­ket in a fast-growing part of town with lots of con­struc­tion. Students are usu­ally envi­ron­men­tally con­scious, but even the older, usu­ally unin­ter­ested group cares in Brunswick. The city’s main land­fill is get­ting full, observes Robbins, and most peo­ple know that. “Everybody in the area’s get­ting very con­scious,” he said.