Waste Reduction Awards Program (WRAP)

Thanksgiving Coffee

WRAP Award Winner: 2003, 2002, and 2001

Introduction

Paul and Joan Katzeff started the Thanksgiving Coffee Company in 1972 in Mendocino, California. In 1987, the company moved to its current 3-acre site in Fort Bragg that formerly housed the Noyo River Inn. The facility includes a 15,000-square-foot building with Thanksgiving’s office and roasting and packing operations. Also on-site are vermicomposting boxes and a 3/4-acre apple orchard.

Today, the company has 60 employees and buys and roasts about 800,000 pounds of green coffee beans a year. The supply comes from Nicaragua (200,000 pounds), Rwanda (150,000 pounds), Ethiopia (75,000 pounds), Uganda (75,000 pounds), Laos (35,000 pounds), Guatemala (75,000 pounds), and 10 additional countries in Central and South America, Indonesia, and Mexico.

Thanksgiving packages and ships coffee in 12-ounce and 5-pound multi-layered aluminum vacuum bags to individual buyers, stores, and restaurants/coffee shops that serve brewed coffee. Thanksgiving Coffee is sold at retail outlets, online, and by phone, primarily in the United States.

A multiple-year Waste Reduction Awards Program (WRAP) winner, Thanksgiving also received a Governor's Environmental and Economic Leadership Award (GEELA) in 2002.

In February 2006, Board staff interviewed co-founder Paul Katzeff and employees Peter Matlin and Ben Corey-Moran. Matlin has been with the company for 11 years and works in purchasing and procurement. Corey-Moran has been with the company for 2-1/2 years and works with the farmers and cooperatives from whom Thanksgiving buys its coffee.

Environmentally Preferable Purchasing

Shade- versus Sun-Grown Coffee
Coffee is currently grown on about 26 million square miles within 10 degrees of the equator, according to Thanksgiving’s website. According to the World Wildlife Institute, "Scientists have found that in full-sun coffee plantations, the number of bird species is reduced by half and the number of individual birds is down as much as two-thirds."

Given that, according to the National Coffee Association, in the U.S. in 2005, over half the 217 million adults drank coffee on a daily basis and 2,607 billion pounds of coffee beans were roasted, the potential environmental impacts from growing coffee are significant.*

Today, 70 percent of the coffee Thanksgiving buys is organic shade-grown.

Fair Trade Coffee
Growing and harvesting of coffee is very hard work, notes Katzeff, and most workers get paid very little. One of the international efforts to better conditions and wages for workers is "Fair Trade." Fair Trade is a practice that creates higher returns for those who actually do the work to produce goods in developing countries by eliminating the middle people in buying transactions and by paying higher prices. This enables small coffee producers to better support themselves and their families.

Currently 30 to 40 percent of Thanksgiving Coffee is Fair Trade Certified, noted Katzeff. The certification is done by TransFair, a nonprofit organization that has been certifying coffee sold in the U.S. as Fair Trade since 1999.

Office/Packing Supplies
According to its WRAP application, Thanksgiving buys office paper that has 30 percent postconsumer recycled content. The company's informational brochures and other printed material are printed on Living Tree Paper, which contains 50 to 90 percent postconsumer content. Thanksgiving also buys eco-friendly dish and hand soap.

Waste Prevention and Reuse

Vacuum Bags
Like most gourmet coffees, Thanksgiving uses vacuum-sealed valve bags to ship its roasted coffee. The bags, made with triple-layer aluminum and a plastic valve, "revolutionized specialty coffee as they allow shipped coffee to retain its flavor," explained Katzeff. Bagging the coffee immediately protects the flavor by keeping out air and moisture, both of which, along with heat, can adversely affect taste.

Coffee bean roasting creates carbon dioxide, a by-product that is trapped in the bean under very high pressure, explained Katzeff. The beans will release carbon dioxide into the bag for three days. If the carbon dioxide was trapped in the bag, it would have no way to escape and the bag would explode from the pressure of the escaping gases. The plastic valve lets the carbon dioxide escape after the coffee is bagged, without letting air or moisture in.

The problem with the bags is that they are not recyclable. Katzeff has calculated that about 100,000 million of the valve bags are used by the coffee industry every year. If they were stacked 3 feet high, they would fill three football fields. Thanksgiving has promoted reuse of the bags and would like to find an alternative. see "What’s Next?" below.

Since the valve bags produce a significant amount of waste, Thanksgiving prints a list of "Re-use Ideas" on its 12-ounce bags. Some ideas are using them for broken glass or light bulb disposal, as a planter for seedlings and for storing various items including wet paint brushes for next day use, seeds for gardening, bait or tackle, and pencils or crayons for school. And, quite innovatively, the bags can be used for buried treasure or as a time capsule. Thanksgiving also asks customers to send in their own ideas. The company doesn’t keep records of how many bags are reused, said Katzeff.

Jute Bags, Chaff, and Coffee
The green coffee beans are shipped to Thanksgiving in 132-pound bags made of jute or hemp. The empty bags are given to gardeners who use them for weed suppression and to the fishing industry for use in cleaning boats and storing fresh-caught fish.

Monthly, the company generates about 600 pounds of chaff, the outer husk of the coffee bean that comes off in the roasting process. About 350 pounds go to gardeners; about 200 pounds, for mulch in the apple orchard; and 50 pounds, to the worms for food (see "Roasting Coffee: Vermicomposting and Apples" below).

Outdated coffee returned from retail sales is donated to the local food bank, explained Matlin.

Packaging
Thanksgiving includes syrups and flavorings from other vendors in its shipments to some of the retail outlets that sell brewed coffee which, in some cases, reduces packaging that would be needed to send those items separately.

The company reuses cardboard boxes that have been reinforced with tape for moving bags of coffee from one place to another inside the facility.

They also use shredded office paper, reused newspaper, and reused peanuts for packing the goods they ship, explained Peter Matlin. The shredded paper goes on the bottom for padding and the newspaper goes on top so that the contents don’t get damaged when the box is cut open.

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Recycling

Thanksgiving has two 2-cubic-yard dumpsters, both of which are emptied weekly by Waste Management, Inc. One bin contains co-mingled recyclables, including cardboard, plastic, metal, cans, and glass; the other is for garbage that goes to the landfill.

Organic Wastes

Growing Coffee: Composting and Sustainability
Growing coffee produces five times as much pulp as coffee, explained Katzeff. The pulp is a by-product of milling, which separates the fleshy part of the coffee berry from the pit. Improperly stored pulp liquid can leak into streams causing serious pollution and even kill fish. Thanksgiving encourages farmers to put the pulp on land away from water sources where it can be composted and then spread on the coffee crop.

Composting is also making coffee production more sustainable by eliminating the need for imported fertilizers. By adding animal manure to the composting berry pulp, farmers can increase the nutrient levels.

Farmers are also experimenting with ways to reduce the need for petroleum-based imports, noted Katzeff. Some farmers are feeding their animals different kinds of foods so they can produce manure that improves the compost. Another example is a farmer in Nicaragua who has developed a tincture from a fungus that was affecting the coffee beans. The farmer now inoculates the plant with the fungus, reducing the need for imported pesticides.

Roasting Coffee: Vermicomposting and Apples
Thanksgiving produces about 100 pounds of coffee grounds per month from coffee brewed for tasting and employees. Since 1999, these grounds have been composted on-site in three 3-by-6-foot worm boxes. Thanksgiving started with 1 pound of red worms, explained Katzeff, and now has millions of the crawlers.

Worms will eat half their body weight every day, noted Katzeff. The coffee grounds are collected in a bin where they sit for a few days before being fed to the worms. The worms also get chaff from the coffee roasting and leftovers from employee lunches and Thanksgiving’s Mendocino Bakery.

Worm castings are removed from the boxes once in the spring and once in October before the rains come, explained Katzeff. One of three methods is used for harvesting castings:

1. Removing the cover and exposing the bin to light so that the top dries out and the worms head to the bottom; the castings are scooped out from the top.
2. Scooping out the bin contents into a volcano shaped cone; the worms migrate to the bottom and the castings are harvested from the cone top.
3. Ceasing feeding on one end of the box while placing food on the other side; the worms will move to the side with the food, and the castings are harvested from the other end.

Katzeff has a degree in pomology, the science of fruit-breeding and production. He planted an apple orchard on-site with 54 different varieties of trees. Each tree gets a bucket of worm castings in the spring around the drip line, he explained. The castings contain worm eggs, which will hatch into more worms. Chaff mulch is also placed around the trees to keep the weeds down.

Transportation Energy

The coffee beans that Thanksgiving buys from Mexico, South and Central America, and Asia are loaded on ships and transported to the Port of Oakland and then trucked by delivery companies to Fort Bragg. Coffee from Africa is trucked through Africa to Germany, explained Corey-Moran. It is then put on ships to be transported to Oakland and finally trucked to Fort Bragg. Katzeff noted that it would be more fuel-efficient if the U.S. only imported coffee from the Americas and African coffees went to Europe.

Thanksgiving uses its own trucks to deliver to Humboldt, Lake, Mendocino, Sonoma, Marin, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Shipping to other locations is done through private trucking companies that use petroleum-based diesel or oil.

Thanksgiving also works with other local companies to do cooperative transportation. For example, Caito Fisheries, Inc. delivers fish to the Bay Area and brings back Thanksgiving’s coffee. Thanksgiving is also talking with retail chain stores in Fort Bragg about additional cooperative transportation arrangements.

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What’s Next

"We are trying to look at every component of the business that can become a model for the environment, for fair labor practice, or for sustainability," explains Katzeff. "What this company is about is trying to create models that other companies can follow."

"There is a difference between leading and following," he continues. "The leaders are pioneers, they say, there is no demand for Fair Trade coffee because no one is promoting it. The pioneer companies, who believe in economic justice as a core value of their business, promote sustainable coffee. The pioneers create the demand by educating retailers and consumers and market to those they have educated. This is very expensive and it is not healthy for a business to stay too far out ahead of the curve for too long. Creating new markets is a good way to go broke!"

"It is important to note that there is a vast difference between a sustainable company and a company that sells some sustainable products. The latter says that if consumers ask, they will carry more sustainable products. That is following. But the sustainable company leads; it refuses to offer non-sustainable products, spends time and effort to educate the retailer and the marketplace, gets the products on the shelf, and takes the risk of the public not knowing what is in front of them."

Coffee Bags
Katzeff has been working with another coffee roaster to create a compostable bag. "It looks like we may be getting close," he noted. "Once we get a compostable bag, other things can happen. We can educate our customers to compost them and we can also give people a discount to return the bags and we’ll compost them."

Solar Energy
Thanksgiving has applied to the California Energy Commission for a $500,000 grant for a solar energy system for the plant, explained Katzeff. "We received a reservation of $79,328 for a 28,331-watt renewable energy generating system that is expected to produce 32,714 kilowatt hours per year. It would be fantastic, on the days the plant is open we would run it on it solar. On the days it is closed, we would pump power back into the grid." The system should meet 44 percent of their energy needs according to the designer, Radiant Solar Technology of Ukiah.

Recapturing Heat from Roasting
Coffee is roasted at 550 degrees, and the after-burner burns off the roasting smoke at 1200 degrees. Roasting the 800,000 pounds of coffee uses about 20,000 gallons of propane a year. "We are producing 500 to 1200 degrees of heat continuously," notes Katzeff, "which is now just vented into the environment." He would like to see this heat recaptured and converted to electricity.

"This would entail getting a heat exchanger which would convert water to stream which would then turn a turbine to produce electricity," explained Katzeff. "It should be possible to do this with off-the-shelf technology. We don’t have the money to do it at this time, but we are willing to offer our plant as a test site to develop this product. There are about 1200 coffee roasters in the U.S., 20 of which are gigantic. Some of them roast as much in a day as we do in a year. So the renewable energy potential is tremendous."

*Statistics from the National Coffee Association, Sept. 13, 2006.

Contact Information

Paul Katzeff
Thanksgiving Coffee
19100 South Harbor Drive
Fort Bragg, CA 95437
(707) 964-0118
www.thanksgivingcoffee.com

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Last updated: March 03, 2008