Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. Looks at Sustainable Products
Fiscal 2012 Sustainability Report Outlines Inreased Fair Trade Certified Coffee Sales and Improved Energy Efficiency
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. (GMCR) recently released its Fiscal 2012 Sustainability Report, outlining the Company's enviironmental and social performance. The report unveils a new focus on three specific practice areas: Resilient Supply Chain, Sustainable Products, and Thriving People and Communities. The following is a more in-depth look at how GMCR is approaching Sustainable Products.
We believe that our products can be sourced, designed, and manufactured in ways that are good for people and good for the environment. We strive for balance in the way we engineer our operations, and our finished products. We engage with players throughout our value chain to understand the social and environmental impacts of our business and our industry. In addition, as a leader in beverages with a positive social impact — particularly Fair Trade coffee — we can encourage consumers to use their purchasing power to support more sustainable products across the entire beverage industry.
In fiscal 2012, we worked to reduce waste and help customers and consumers dispose of product-related packaging. We continued to make progress toward our reduction targets for energy use and waste to landfill, even as our rapid business growth challenged those efforts. A comprehensive life cycle assessment of our K-Cup® packs has helped identify and focus our efforts on the areas that pose the greatest environmental challenges. And, we have coupled our support of coffee from Rainforest Alliance Certified™ farms with consumer education campaigns that demonstrate the benefits for farmers and for the environment using a model that generates consumer demand for certified coffees.
As our business grows, we hold fast to our belief that our responsibility is to create sustainable products that help us to brew a better world.
Some other key accomplishments include:
- More than tripling the amount of waste chaff, burlap, coffee, powder, and tea that we composted, and increased recycling of corrugated boxes, boxboard, paper, and plastics by 50% in its facilities, compared to the previous year.
- Being ranked the largest purchaser of Fair Trade Certified™ coffee in the world for the second year running by Fair Trade USA (2010, 2011)
- Selling 11 million pounds of coffee from Rainforest Alliance Certified™ farms
