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| Karen Mercer by Sallie Tchang |
It is almost 6 years ago now that Gunter and I opened our little shop on Shepton Mallet High Street and we've been running our My Coffee Stop business for over 10 years, after we first opened our doors in Enfield! Right from the beginning we were focused on sustainability and were concerned about how we could contribute to the world and add to it, rather than erode its resources. We are lead by passion and not profit and feel it is up to little businesses, like ours, to lead the way, so that big businesses will soon follow.
Our little venture has grown slowly and organically into a coffee and zero waste shop, as a natural extension of our business aims and we are doing all we can to support people in their quest for a plastic free lifestyle.
When we first opened in Shepton Mallet, we started off with just a coffee machine, coffee and cups and tried to give our coffee away for free, so that people could taste it but everyone wanted to pay for it, as they felt it tasted so good and they wanted to support us in our endeavours!
As well as being a community coffee shop, our shop is like a campaign base that instigates major changes that ripple through to the very top of major chains! It's a very inspirational way to work. We started serving our coffee and cakes in compostable/recyclable cups and bags, right from the beginning! For instance, the bags we use for our cakes are home compostable and we make sure our customers know that. It was just a natural progression for us to extend what we were doing for ourselves and the choices we made and make them available for our customers! So, for over a year now we have been offering customers refills for their washing up liquid bottles and their laundry liquid bottles, we have saved loads of bottles that are now being reused, from the landfill and saved the energy that would be used in recycling them.
We have listened to what our customers have told us they need and they bring along their own containers and we refill them with herbs and spices, pasta, rice, oats, dates, sun dried tomatoes and so on. I have noticed that some people feel bad about all the things they are not doing for the environment but I like to encourage people to make small manageable changes and celebrate those, which is better than making no changes at all and feeling paralysed by the enormity of the task at hand!
When one of our coffee drinking customers decides to make a small change by buying our toilet paper in home compostable film, or they decide to save their hand wash bottle and fill it with our soap, we get very excited and happy. Our hearts are definitely in our jobs. We hope to be encouraging people to keep making positive changes to help the environment for a good few years yet, so we'd love you to come along and take a look and see how we can help you to be the change that you want to see!
Now that Plastic Free July has ended, we hope that you will keep making the changes with us and keep going and don't forget, it's about focusing on the positive and what you can do and recognising that each little step that you take is to be celebrated, it's not about reprimanding yourself and tying yourself up in knots about the things that you weren't able to do yet.
Let's keep facing this challenge together and doing the best that we can and maybe one day, we won't even need a plastic free July because we will all be so good at living a plastic free and sustainable lifestyle.
Look, I have to be honest, I am not perfect either but I am trying my best and how do you think I felt when my ten year old son sold some of his toys to raise some money for himself and then promptly went out and bought 4 bottles of water in plastic bottles and a plastic bag!? Maybe he was rebelling, I don't know but I wondered how he could think it was a good idea, even when our whole business is about cutting down waste and it is a part of our every day life, so I really do understand how everything's not always perfect and it is hard to get the whole family to follow the ethos. I honestly thought that he would 'model' my behaviour but that obviously didn't happen. Maybe that is why it is important that big industry makes a better example and leads the way, the bottles shouldn't even be there to buy.
Now that Plastic Free July has ended, we hope that you will keep making the changes with us and keep going and don't forget, it's about focusing on the positive and what you can do and recognising that each little step that you take is to be celebrated, it's not about reprimanding yourself and tying yourself up in knots about the things that you weren't able to do yet.
Let's keep facing this challenge together and doing the best that we can and maybe one day, we won't even need a plastic free July because we will all be so good at living a plastic free and sustainable lifestyle.
Look, I have to be honest, I am not perfect either but I am trying my best and how do you think I felt when my ten year old son sold some of his toys to raise some money for himself and then promptly went out and bought 4 bottles of water in plastic bottles and a plastic bag!? Maybe he was rebelling, I don't know but I wondered how he could think it was a good idea, even when our whole business is about cutting down waste and it is a part of our every day life, so I really do understand how everything's not always perfect and it is hard to get the whole family to follow the ethos. I honestly thought that he would 'model' my behaviour but that obviously didn't happen. Maybe that is why it is important that big industry makes a better example and leads the way, the bottles shouldn't even be there to buy.
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