SuperFeast Responsible Businessing and Our Pledge for 2019

It's a wild world out there, Mother Earth is in a spot of bother. And while we are so aligned and attuned to her rhythms with our Dì Dào (地道) / Di Tao sourcing, as a small biz, we're amping up our eco efforts. Join on us on the journey...

US-based Natural Resources Defense Council has launched a 2019 resolution campaign so we can all make a public pledge to do our bit for the planet. We love this quote they shared: 

“If there’s a world here in a hundred years, it’s going to be saved by tens of millions of little things.” Peter Seger

We have already committed a lot of time and energy to making SuperFeast more eco, here’s some of the steps we have taken to make our business more responsible:

• we have really cut down on our soft plastic use (we recycle our office soft plastics at the Woolies bin, which is one of the only places in Byron Shire you can actually recycle soft plastic). Check this site to find where your local drop off is.
• we use Who Gives A Crap (we love this company!!) for our loo paper
• we have our spring water delivered from Oasis in a 200L tank so we don’t use plastic water bottles or have to drink municipal water! (Say no to single use plastics)!
• SuperFeast HQ has only two desktops in a team of 14 (desktops use 4x more power than laptops)
• we have invested in 100% green power with Powershop 
• our HQ will be 100% solar-powered by mid 2019
• we rarely print except for your orders and when we do it’s on recycled paper (also, the business’s kids benefit from an abundance of drawing paper when we take the used sheets home!)
• 99% of our snail mail has been eliminated (hello: electronic statements, you guys!) and we do email receipts when it’s an option
• you will notice upon your cart 'check out' you have to opt in to receive our tonic herb brochure (so feel free to opt out, if you already have brochures at home)
• our crew BYO bowls or reusable cups when they buy lunches and we show up to McTavish with 10-14 coffee cups for our daily brew (all carried on a cardboard tray, it’s pretty funny to watch)
• we compost. Properly. That was a process and is thanks to Farley’s persistence and our neighbours at Subpod (most composting CONTRIBUTES to methane production, unless you’re doing it properly. Mason has a podcast with Andrew coming out shortly)
• we are currently trialling paper sticky tapes to post our your orders
• we’re currently trialing 100% home compostable packaging (the first experiment was a bit of a disaster, the herbs were ruined in three months, so that’s a work in progress...!)

We’ve also made our bulk bags (250g, 500g and 1kg) cheaper to encourage to you purchase more, less often. Just make sure you store them in the fridge or freezer (packed in Tupperware) if you’re not using them regularly so they don’t get exposed to humidity.

All that’s great, but we thought it’d be fun to up our game, so here goes!! 

Our 5 for the planet this year are:

1. Get an overall energy audit to see how we’re really doing (we’ve gone ahead and scheduled this for January!) update May: we were visited by a Bin Trim assessor (via the EPA) and our audit went really well. Feedback from our assessor, "...you guys are really inspiring and doing all the right things to minimise your environmental impact! It's difficult for me to come up with many actions for you to implement to improve your environmental performance as you're already doing everything I usually recommend which is awesome! Your main opportunity is definitely purchasing waste avoidance or recycling equipment." We are still looking into any relevant equipment we could use to decrease some of our warehouse waste at the moment. Nothing yet has been relevant for our biz.
2. Eliminate appliances that draw excess energy - use power strips to prevent the drawing of unnecessary power for appliances that need to remain plugged in. Check desktops are set to ‘Sleep’ after 30 mins
3. Look into carbon offsets for businesses - if you have any recommendations for companies with integrity offering offsets, let us know
4. Keep seeking a source of compostable packaging for our bulk products. update May: we are now onto our fourth trial. None have worked and we've had company's in the space tell us that at this stage, the technology is just not quite there. Now looking into some other ideas...
5. Record our business’s sources of sustainable and recyclable resources so we can share them with other like-minded businesses. You can follow the NRDC here: @nrdc_org
   
   We have a newer update on our eco journey, get the update here