Sustainable Break Room Practices and Suppliers

Have you thought about commercial composting? We were surprised about how much waste can be composted. Basically anything organic that hasn't been contaminated by chemicals can be composted by commercial composting operations including coffee pods, wooden stir sticks, paper, many take-out containers, leftovers from the back of the fridge etc. etc. Many cities have compost haulers that will provide a weekly pick-up for a reasonable fee. It also drastically reduces the weight of your landfill waste if you are charged by weight.

This is a good question. We have regular drip coffee makers and lease two fancier “brew-to-order” machines in our main lobby space – both end up with coffee grounds and paper filters that are compostable. We implemented a composting program here in Philadelphia but our commercial composter warned us that many of the non-food type waste does not compost quickly enough to be useful to them – they screen out the “compostable plastic” and even the paper cups and send them to landfill, so they recommended we focus on food waste (including the food waste). It is an ongoing process (not to mention the change management of getting people to comply). Depends on the composter, which is very regional. Jonathan Weiss, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, WELL AP, Fitwel | Jacobs | Director of Sustainability | Buildings + Infrastructure | + 01.215.446.3360 | + 01.215.620.7322 mobile | jonathan.weiss@jacobs.com | www.jacobs.com From: Dougl

I bought my parents reusable K-cup coffee filters which you would load up with whatever ground coffee you like for each cup of coffee, run the machine, then dump (or compost) grounds, rinse and repeat. Maybe if each coffee drinker got their own reusable pod that would give people ownership of a more sustainable solution. This may be harder to implement on an office scale versus home scale, we are trying to tackle waste in our firm as well; it's a hard ask to try change human habits and behavior. Best of luck!

We lease a brew-to-order machine. The waste generated is the coffee grounds and the laminated bags the coffee comes in, plus bags/bladders for the chocolate syrup and powdered milk. But overall much less waste than K-cups, and the coffee grounds go into our municipal compost. Our neighbors upstairs are using cloth towels and a laundry service to cut down on paper towels and we are looking to implement that as well. We have a water cooler/heater hooked up to the domestic water supply and we strongly discourage/prohibit bottled water in the office. Any office lunches or catering is buffet style in reusable, recyclable, or compostable containers. We do not allow boxed-lunch or individual-serving catering. Single-use cutlery is compostable, but we strongly encourage the use of metal cutlery.

Instead of a brew-to-order machine, we provide an espresso machine (Breville) w/ an integrated grinder. We purchase the organic beans from a roaster just down the street from us. For those who like flavor in their coffee, we have several flavored syrups – maybe that is a way to wean people from the pod addiction? We have a large assortment of tea varieties, in bags. Would love to see tea purchased loose but so far that has not gained traction. We also have regular drip coffee, as the espresso machine would be too slow to accommodate larger groups. After going through the process of JUST Label, we started providing spa water, infused with daily combinations of fruit, cucumber, and/or herbs. That has been very popular with staff and visitors. For a while, we tried ordering the fruit and veggies from Imperfect Produce, but their set up was not geared towards commercial delivery.  We use city composting now which does not allow compostable cutlery or plastic, or any paper products except for coffee filters and tea bags. Previously we composted our waste on the roof of our building; once a year we formed an all-office bucket brigade down the back stairs to remove the composted material. It was a really fun team building exercise. I miss that! We provide cloth towels for hand drying in the kitchen. But we still struggle with people going through way too many paper towels. Good luck!  

For our Living Building in Sacramento, we were concerned both about waste and energy usage when choosing a coffeemaker.  The selection of a coffeemaker became one of the funniest and most controversial decisions we made since it hit home to so many people.  We settled on a low-energy usage drip coffeemaker that doesn't satisfy everyone, but people do bring their own flavorings and the office provides organic milk and milk alternatives.  We use recycled paper filters and have our own organic composter on site that our building manager maintains. The compost then goes to our landscaping.

We recently transitioned from K-cup to brew-to-order machines. We're currently working on getting Bevi service to replace cans of La Croix, soda, juice we currently offer. We ran a cost comparative analysis and we'll not only save money each month, but the environmental impact is significantly less. We also use cloth hand towels and a composting service. With composting, we've found that signage and periodic reminders of what goes in what bin is key!