Boston Tea Party celebrates 1st Cuppaversary by launching 'National Making Things Better Day'
One year ago, independently owned coffee chain Boston Tea Party (BTP) – which has 22 coffee shops across the UK, including in Exeter, Plymouth and Barnstaple – took the bold step of banning the use of single use coffee cups. It is celebrating its first Cuppaversary by making 1st June ‘National Making Things Better Day’.
From now on, each year on 1st June, BTP will pledge something more for the planet. This year, it is removing single use plastic milk bottles.
Boston Tea Party’s 22 cafés currently use a staggering 190,000 single use plastic milk bottles every year, and milk is one of BTP’s biggest annual costs at over £220,000. So as the business focuses on milk packaging, it is perhaps no coincidence that 1st June is also National Milk Day!
“What a year it has been since we took the ground breaking decision to remove single use cups from our business,” says Sam Roberts, co-owner and CEO of BTP. “The reaction from our teams and customers has been frankly amazing.
“12 months on and the anti-plastic movement is really gathering some significant momentum. That said, nothing much has actually changed within the wider industry. Lots of noise and sticky plaster fixes, but very little concrete action. Businesses still seem happy to turn a blind eye to the waste product from their activities thereby outsourcing the cost and responsibility of the clean-up. Not cool.
“We’re on a continuous journey to try and make things better, and with this in mind we’ve decided to launch our very own ‘Making Things Better Day’ on the 1st June, forever. Each year we’ll be announcing a (for now) plastic based problem we’ll commit to resolve. This June we’re gunning for single use plastic milk bottles. By the end of this year we reckon we’ll have rid ourselves of them entirely. Good times. However we can’t afford to rest on our laurels and can’t fix this on our own, so please get involved.”
To remove single use plastic milk bottles, Boston Tea Party is working closely with its organic dairy supplier to select the most sustainable solution. It is avoiding glass for health and safety reasons and over the next 6 weeks they are switching to pergals, which save 6.5 milk bottles with each bag in box milk. BTP will then be switch to a fully reusable, returnable solution with its dairy by the end of the year. BTP will be the first UK café chain to have done this.
Celebrating BTP’s 1st Cuppaversary
One year after implementing its bold single use coffee cup ban – and risking £1million in takeaway hot drink sales – BTP has stopped over 150,000 disposable coffee cups from entering local waste management streams – and ultimately, due to their non-recyclable nature, going into landfill. That equates to 158 cubic meters of landfill space, the equivalent of more than six typical municipal refuse disposal vehicles.
BTP customers taking away hot drinks now do so in reusable cups. They are welcome to bring their own reusable cups, to borrow a loan cup and bring it back at their convenience for a full refund or buy an Ecoffee cup. BTP has sold close to 30,000 reusable Ecoffee cups at cost price, making it as easy as possible for its customers to #CHOOSEtoREUSE.
While BTP has lost 25% of takeaway customers, the business is in growth with eat-in increasing. And team leavers are at an all-time low – 32% better than ever before. “They want to stay, and work with us,” says BTP Brand Director Anita Atkins.
Ecoffee Cup founder David McLagan says: “Staff turnover represents a significant cost with a constant need to train new employees – resulting in costs to the business close to £1m per year. Since the ban was introduced a year ago, BTP staff turnover has pretty much dropped by over 30%. It appears that a casual workforce comprised largely of millennials do genuinely want to believe in a third way of doing things. Removing single-use cups has obviously struck a chord with staff and, at least in part, was responsible for BTP being voted Britain’s most ethical café in 2019*.”
