We are Eco-Friendly
We are proud to be one of the very few coffeehouses in the state of Connecticut that specifically strives towards reducing waste and working towards a more sustainable initiative. While we are not 100% zero waste just yet, our team works hard everyday to do our part. Being environmentally friendly is a very loose term nowadays. Even though we are not perfect, you can trust that we are doing everything in our power to make our store more sustainable and do what we can to help clean up the planet. There are many strategies we practice everyday to minimize our impact that, overtime, we will share with you here. So keep following along and watch our store evolve into the first coffeehouse in Connecticut to have a net impact of zero!
Meet Our Environmental Consultant
As part of our sustainable initiative, we have an environmental consultant to ensure our store continuously builds on our environmental plan.
Meet Tess!
Tess is extremely passionate about her environmental work here. She has played a major role in our eco-initiative and has focused a lot of her time on making our shop’s environmental plan. With Tess’s help, we have created a series of projects to strive towards our goal of having a completely up-cycled product with a zero percentage of wasted material. This means that our end goal is to be able to filter any waste created in our store, whether that be our coffee grinds, food scraps or coffee cups into a regenerative material. Even though our main mission is to reduce, we emphasize on reusing and repurposing any and all of our waste created in our store.
Not only does she work directly with our sustainable initiative, Tess also works as a health and wellness coach and has even created our entire smoothie menu! Tess makes an incredible smoothie and is extremely eager to share her love of nutrient dense smoothies and knowledge of how all around wellness is tied to our sustainable initiative with you!
Stop by and catch Tess either working in the garden or making smoothies inside! We have so much going on at the shop so if you have any questions or want to learn more about our environmental projects, sustainability, or all around health and wellness Tess would love to talk to you!
What Sustainable Practices We Follow
Here at Crossroads, we have a lot of fun projects going on. Before we break down some of our bigger projects, it is important to understand the value and relation each project has towards one another. Our end goal is for our products and shop as a whole to have a net impact of zero and up-cycle any and all of our waste into regenerative material. Essentially, we strive towards minimizing our waste entirely and finding a purpose for any waste we do create. There are a few ways we can make this happen. Overtime we are working towards making as much of our dry goods, meaning coffee cups, to go containers and etc all compostable material. Anything we cannot compost or recycle we plan to send to a facility that can turn it into regenerative energy.
One huge project we are continuously developing is our garden! We grow herbs, tomatoes, peppers, squash and much more! Our goal is to grow as much of our food as we can that we sell in our products. Soon, we plan to create our own compost pile as a part of this project. Essentially what once was thrown away is now thrown into compost that can then break down and become soil that can be used to grow food. Our end goal is to create a closed-loop cycle, where we continuously give back to the earth in equivalent amounts to what we take from it.
Inside the store, another one of our main projects we have been building is switching our dry goods all to reusable, recyclable and compostable products. With the phrase “reduce, reuse, recycle” we believe the level of importance should fall on reducing our plastic and reusing what we can before we recycle. We highly encourage our customers to bring in their own coffee cups and even offer a 10% discount for those that do. So help us help the planet by bringing in your own containers and maybe together we can make a huge impact on the world, one sip at a time!
Let’s Save The Planet Together!
One of our other projects is finding ways to share with you all better information about how you can develop your own sustainable initiative too. As we continue to develop our environmental plan we will continue to share our entire process with you!
Because we are only a small business, we can only do so much. We want our voice to be heard. We want our community to build a more sustainable mind so we can all help save the planet and help make this world a better place. So, let’s do it together!
Follow along here for more updates on general sustainability information and for more details on our environmental work. Like we mentioned, we have a lot of big projects happening and we are extremely excited to share them all with you!