Earth Day 2022’s call to action

Since 1972, communities, faith groups, and organizations across our country have united on April 22 for Earth Day.

Earth Day’s mission seeks to inspire and increase focus on improved stewardship of the natural world and the resources they offer us. This cohesive, coordinated, and diverse movement is now celebrated by more than a billion people and encompasses countries around the globe to work in partnership for the betterment of our planet.

As a hometown craft coffee roastery, Vienna Coffee Company (VCC) remains focused on our vision to ensure sustainable practices in our economic, environmental, and relational interactions for our community and beyond. Supporting this vision includes responsible sourcing of coffee from seed to cup and inspires us to expand our efforts in support of Earth Day everyday.

Vienna Coffee Company launches

REDUCE / REUSE / RECYCLE

With an emphasis on our vision, VCC takes our commitment seriously to support the sustainability of our natural resources. From our large-scale efforts to source and offer Fair Trade USA certified coffees, to recycling our cardboard, and sourcing special recyclable coffee bags, we strive daily to tread as lightly as possible on our planet by incorporating actions of sustainability into our business practices.

In response to Earth Day’s 2022 call to Invest in Our Planet, VCC invites our community to partner with our REDUCE / REUSE / RECYCLE sustainability initiatives.

Check out how you can Reduce waste at the Vienna Coffee House or Reuse several byproducts and scraps from operations at our Coffee House and Roastery so we can keep them out of our community’s waste stream!

at the Vienna Coffee House

Do you have a favorite travel mug? Bring it with you to the Coffee House and claim your discount on drip coffee from the coffee bar every time you visit (If you need a new favorite mug, check out our Vienna travel mugs at the Coffee House or online here).

with Vienna Coffee Company Roastery

Gardening, composting, animal bedding… and more!

Our Roastery also offers free coffee grounds, wooden pallets, and coffee chaff (yes, free!). As these items are available, we leave them for pickup outside the Roastery (check the lower level of our Maryville location beside the Roastery and our outside porch). Please help yourself to the pallets stacked against the wall, the bagged chaff, or coffee-ground buckets (please return buckets to be refilled). Inquire in person at the Vienna ORNL counter for availability at that location.

We already have several enlightened customers who benefit from these VCC byproducts and scrap. So, we want to let all of you in on several not-so-secret uses for coffee grounds, pallets, and coffee chaff.

Coffee Grounds

“Coffee Grounds” are the byproduct of brewing ground coffee beans.

While often considered a waste product, coffee grounds actually present a wide range of REUSE possibilities. Here are a few articles that take the coffee grounds out of the waste stream and beyond the compost pile:

Coffee grounds: Skin scrubs, dyes, cleaners, and more ~MedicalNewsToday

Coffee Grounds and Composting ~ Oregon State University

Pallets

“Wooden pallets” typically consist of three or four stringers that support deck boards, on top of which the goods are placed.

With a few woodworking skills in hand, ideas for the REUSE of wooden pallets are endless with a simple search of the internet (Have you heard of Pinterest and YouTube?!). To save you a search, here are a couple of links, but feel free to search for yourself:

10 Easy and Cheap Pallet Furniture Ideas ~ Homedit on YouTube

Uses for old pallets ~ Pinterest

Coffee Chaff

Chaff (also known as silverskins or husk) is the epidermis of coffee beans that falls off during roasting due to the application of heat.

This byproduct of roasting is light and fluffy in texture. The most practical REUSE of chaff is to mix it with compost or fertilizer… and apparently, tomatoes, in particular, benefit highly from its high nitrogen content.

What You Can Do with Coffee Chaff – Don’t Waste the Waste! ~ CoffeeExtraction.com

Zero waste: What is chaff & how can specialty roasters reuse it? ~ Mtpak.coffee

Burlap or Recycled Jean coffee bags

Green beans arrive at our Roastery in sturdy burlap sacks from across the Coffee Belt growing region. These sacks are already popular with many crafters and gardeners for their multipurpose uses. For a nominal fee, they are available from our Roastery to take home for these uses and more:

• Five cool ways to upcycle old coffee sacks ~ from Popular Science

at the Vienna Coffee House

As we emphasized before, VCC continually strives to be a responsible steward of our resources throughout the Coffee House and Roastery. Whenever possible we seek responsible methods to REDUCE / REUSE / RECYCLE within our operations. We consistently recycle cardboard at the Coffee House & Roastery (and we get plenty of it!). Additionally, we proudly source our recyclable coffee bags from Savor Brands in Honolulu, HI.

These bags provide you with the opportunity to return empty Vienna Coffee Co. bags & metal tie tins to the designated recycle boxes at the Coffee House. For information on returning your VCC bags to recycle, please Click Here. We gladly ship them off to be processed once our recycle boxes are full.

Since we source bags specifically designed to be recycled, we cannot guarantee that other coffee brands source the same way. So please limit what you place into our recycle boxes to Vienna Coffee Co. bags.

Creating Partnership for the Planet

At VCC, we strongly feel that these initiatives reinforce our focus be a market leader in craft coffee throughout the southeast by providing an excellent coffee experience. We are proud to base our business in and be an active supporter of our hometown community in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

We hope that our efforts, along with yours, will help us ensure the continued sustainability of the natural resources of our beautiful piece of East Tennessee and extends across the globe.