We understand ‘responsible consumption’ to mean a cycle where neither production nor consumption leave the land and farmers worse off than they were before. This sounds straightforward but let’s be honest, almost everything extracts more from the earth than it gives back. For us at Black Baza, nothing exemplifies this circularity more than our tryst with packaging.
At first, we used paper pouches glued tightly to foil. They stood up and you could reseal using ziplocks. Not a sq.cm was biodegradeable or even recyclable. Now, we use the best available option but there are disclaimers here. It is still single use, the biodegradeable bags could take 24 months to degrade and there just isn’t enough data on what soil quality is like afterwards (the ink cannot be great!).
So, at best, what Black Baza does is only offset our bad deeds in other ways – by reforesting coffee landscapes, enabling wildlife to flourish in these habitats and preventing the irreversible death of our soils.
Arshiya
This is a voice that you first encountered at BIC a few days ago.
I read everything(?) and was touched by the low key humour in the captions to the photographs in ‘A decade in coffee’.
It’s a pity that I’m not young enough to join you in your work.