Royal Copenhagen Brighton

Royal Copenhagen in Brighton is a sustainable Ice Creamery and Dessert Bar committed to reducing waste and protecting environment. In this short interview with Tiarne, we can all see how small changes we make to our everyday business decision making can contribute to building more sustainable communities.

Tiarne mentioned that their business has produced 3000 tonnes of waste over the last 7 years. We asked her few more questions to learn more about their approach to the organic waste and the food recycling strategy.

Q: What steps did you take to reduce waste in your business?

Firstly, we conducted a waste audit which involved sorting through our bins to see how many food scraps could be separated from the general waste or recycled in some other way. After implementing changes in our packaging, we have been able to reduce our waste to landfill by 80%.  We also use Jeffries Food Organics Recycling Collection (FORC) service which visits our business once a week.
Q: Why was it so important to recycle food scraps?

We have a beautiful pristine coastline right at our doorstep so we are very aware of our impact on the environment. It was confronting to see waste and litter strewn along the shore, most of which could’ve come from our store.

Although we were doing our best to reduce our impact on the environment at home, we started to recognise that the biggest difference could be made by changing our practices in store. The amount of waste we were creating on a daily basis (most of which was going straight to landfill) didn’t sit right with us. We had to make a change.
Q: What other sustainable initiatives are you working on?

We have initiated a system where all of our waste is being recycled. This includes: green organics, cardboard, soft plastics and 10c bottles. They are all separated from our landfill items to reduce the amount going to landfill overall. A big part of this has been educating our staff, and soon we will roll out separated bins for customers too. We hope that when other businesses see how easy it is to implement, it will encourage them to join.

We have also changed over all of our packaging to make it 100% compostable, this includes our coffee cups, spoons, straws and sugar sachets. These can all go in our green bin now. We also implemented a highly-successful KeepCup scheme where customers who brought in their own reusable cup received a $2 coffee. We ran this campaign for 4 months and saved over 4,000 single use cups from landfill. We are so happy with the impact this has had and how it’s encouraged so many people to change over to a reusable cup. We congratulate all of our customers on their efforts in this campaign.”

IMAGE GALLERY

Photo credits to Samantha Agostino & Georgie Shepherd