About Farmer Brothers
Farmer Brothers is a coffee roaster, wholesaler, and distributor of coffee, tea, and culinary items across the United States. The firm provides beverage planning services to over 65,000 clients in the States.
Idea and Implementation
The company had set a 90% waste reduction goal and this initiative was taken by Sarah Beaubien, Product Manager of the company. She was taken aback by the massive amount of garbage the farmer brothers’ coffee generated. At least 15,000 pounds of coffee chaff every month was dumped by the firm.
She introduced more sustainable and waste-reduction ideas to the management. This was possible after using resources such as the Impact at Work toolkit. She took the help of more than 20 other Portland employees to establish a trash management effort.
Results
Over four years, the staff reused or recycled almost 60% of the garbage generated at headquarters, setting an example for other Farmer Brother outlets to follow. At the same time, Beaubien’s team assisted the organization in considerably lowering expenses and generating new revenue streams by selling garbage to people who gained from it.
“We want our company to be setting a new standard for manufacturing waste streams, our ultimate goal is zero waste to landfill by 2015 for all Farmer Brothers sites.” – Sarah Beaubien.
Ideas like this are an ode to sustainability. Another example we witnessed of an organization taking up sustainable measures was Microsoft and there are countless others who have been working on sustainability. Encouraging ideas like this doesn’t just benefit the organization, but the environment around it too.
On that note, do you realize your employees might have such revolutionary ideas too? Are you capturing them? If you answered no to both questions, you got to read this and this.
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