Sustainability is super important to us at Bird & Blend. We’re working with a specialist sustainability expert (the lovely Cush, featured below!) to take a holistic view of our approach to environment & ethics. Cush is working on our SustainabiliTEA Manifesto by taking a deep dive on all things supply chain, product innovation, BCorp certifications, internal processes & more!
How does this fit into our crowdfund?
Well, we will be using part of the finances raised in our EquiTEA Crowdfund 2.0 to fund the work that Cush has started in taking us through our BCorp journey (keep your eyes peeled for more updates) as well as investing into our goals of making an impactful change in the world around us by kicking off meaningful social and environmental projects.
So let's hear more about our sustainabiliTEA goals!
We're trying to:
- Achieve Net-Zero emissions. This means reducing our emissions by 90% by 2030. Some of the plans involved in this will range from looking at installing solar panels to finding new environmentally friendly ways to ship our tea. We will pay for carbon capture through tree planting initiatives and other carbon reducing projects for the remaining emissions that we cannot eradicate.
- Become zero waste. We are already zero to landfill but we want to reduce the waste that is sent to incineration to be turned into energy. This means making sure all the resources we use to make packaging and products can either be reused or recycled. As well as monitoring that the resources we use are environmentally friendly.
- Have a bigger & better social impact. Expanding our chariTEA initiatives, to create bigger collaborations and partnerships that allow us to use our position as a business to create a positive impact on our communities.
- Advocate. Using our resources as a business to advocate for wider change at the local, national and global level. This is vital to ensure that we can achieve some of our goals as they are dependent on wider change in our communities.
- Achieve BCorp certification. We’re not too fussed about the points, we are using BCorp as a framework to improve our business, so that we know we are doing business for good as well as good business. We are excited to join a movement that is pushing business to focus on people and planet as well as profit.
If you like what you hear and want to become a part of the Bird & Blend family, then join us on this journey by signing up below & find out how you can invest!
Investments of this nature carry risks to your capital.
3 comments
Hello,
Thank you for leaving a comment on our blog post!
As a tea company we specialise in fun, unique and exciting blends, due to this we are in a unique position in the market as we aim to have the widest range of tea blends available to customers. However this comes with a drawback of having an extremely complicated supply chain. In any blend there can be around 10 different ingredients from tea to herbs to unique ingredients that don’t fit into either category.
Given this complexity we aren’t able to match some of the ethical claims of single origin brands but we do a lot to ensure that we’re sourcing ethically. All of our suppliers are screened with a supplier code of conduct to ensure that they have ethical labour practises which match our ethos as a company.
As we specialise in high quality ingredients, the majority of our producers use organic and sustainable farming methods. However due to the high costs of a lot of the certifications, not all of our producers are ‘officially’ organic or Fairtrade. This is the same case for Fairtrade and rainforest alliance certifications; a lot of our producers adopt all the same practises but if they are small family run farms the costs and the paperwork are a barrier to them being able to gain the ‘official’ badge. Therefore we opt to have a diverse range of suppliers from large estates that have multiple certifications to supporting smallholder farmers who are part of cooperatives.
I can also confirm that, yes, we are a proud living wage employer!
Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns :)
Lizzie @ B&B
Thanks for making your sustainability statement easily available. I didn’t see anything relating to Diversity & Inclusion; will you be updating soon?
How are you protecting the interests of the people who actually pick and grow the tea you sell?how do you protect the interests of the people working in your stores in the UK – do you pay the Living Wage?
Thanks