Congratulations to America’s Best Coffee (ABC) Roasting Company for earning an Honorable Mention in the RPA Excellence in Reusable Packaging Award Program.
The specialty coffee roaster successfully eliminated two recurring sources of waste from its production process. First, it replaced 2,500 cardboard boxes—used to send roasted coffee beans to customers for further processing and packaging—with reusable plastic bins. The cost savings for avoided purchases of cardboard boxes is $4,250 per year.
Second, the company stopped bagging coffee in thick plastic bags for one particularly large customer. Now, ABC packs its coffee in reusable bulk containers, eliminating more than 1,000 plastic bags each week. More dramatically, labor savings from reduced packing and unpacking is $6,000 per year for ABC Roasting Company and $6,000 per year for its customer. According to EPA’s WARM model, these packaging use reductions will save an estimated 34.7 tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year over the project’s estimated five year projectlife.