ABOUT THE FRESH CHAI CO.

Our eco report card

I’ve shared my efforts here to plant seeds for other businesses and reassure you that minimizing our impact is super important to me. It’s very much a work in progress so if you know of other ideas or improvements than please email me your thoughts.
Adam Donoghue (Founder)

We’ve pledged 1% of all our sales to the preservation and restoration of the natural environment. Find out more here https://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org/

Cups, cups and more cups!

We use reusable cups (sourced from op shops) for all our market, expo and festival events. We also use reusable sample cups. Hooray, no single use cups! 

Delivery Satchels

We’ve been on the hunt for the perfect (or at least the least bad) satchel for a while. We tried compostable ones , but found out they have a very high invested energy, plus most people weren’t composting them. We tried paper/card satchels but had issues in wet weather.  So we’ve settled on recyclable plastic ones made from 100% post consumer recycled plastic. It has low invested energy, is easily recycled and supports the recycling industry. 

Chai Packaging

I looked long and hard world-wide for compostable ‘sticky stuff’ friendly packaging when we last ordered our packaging. But alas the technology wasn’t there yet (dry stuff is easy). Also since then I’ve learned more about the high invested energy in compostables and low rate of packet composting by consumers so I’m now not convinced it’s the answer. Glass was out due to freight issues, high invested energy cost and a poor recycling system in Australia (most being stockpiled at the time). So we are switching all our packaging (as we run out of existing stock) over to recyclable soft plastic pouches due to low invested energy and ease of recycling. Currently all our 1kg packets are recyclable and the masala, caffeine free, dandy and original blends in the 250g size.

Towards zero waste

My favourite!

I reuse our 10 litre honey buckets to supply the majority of our cafes. I will also happily refill any container you have if you can bring it to me (just email me  to organise a time).

Also ask your local shop to do our chai in bulk as I would love to have more bulk stockists.

Energy, water & waste

Your chai is precision ground using solar power (we are 100% solar powered). We recycle everything we can including soft plastics. Our chai is made on a mountain in the Sunshine Coast hinterland and run on filtered rain water.  We have very little waste, we reuse the tea sacks as bin liners, reuse all cardboard boxes that we receive for outgoing orders.