Perk Eco CEO Jennifer Henry / You can recycle coffee cups and lids!

https://perk.eco/
Are you ready to recycle coffee cups and lids at your coffee shop?

Are you a coffee roaster that needs to properly dispose of the chaff?

Did you know they make dog beds out of coffee chaff? 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-henry-a760521a/

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Transcript

Cory Connors: 0:31

Welcome to Sustainable Packaging with Cory Connors. Today's guest is Jennifer Henry, the founder, and c e O of Perk Eco.

Jennifer Henry: 0:39

How are you? Great. Thanks for having me Corey.

Cory Connors: 0:42

Thanks for being on. I saw what you and your company are doing, and I was thrilled to interview you about this very unique topic in the world of sustainability, but very important topic in my opinion and, and in many people's opinions. Can you tell us about yourself though, before we get into what you're doing for, for work? Mm-hmm.. Jennifer Henry: Sure. So, I'm basically , a bit of a, a waste nerd., over the past 12 years I've been working in sustainability and recycling and I've just become fascinated with making the best use. Of materials at the end of their life. I, I love thinking about it. I love problem solving. I love innovating. And as a kind of a entrepreneur at my core yeah, I'm just always looking for the next problem to solve. Definitely you know, I'm a bit of a hustler in terms of just making things happen outta nowhere if I can. And finding and partnering with great people along the way to just make it all happen. Yeah, and there's. Let's face it. A lot of problems to solve in the world. Yeah., of waste. So when it comes to the packaging end of things, I love talking to people who are on the design end of it. Mm-hmm. and you are one of those links to that. So I'm really happy to be hearing Pat about it. But yeah, I'm, I'm here in Vancouver, BC so a little bit not too far away from you . But I'm here in Canada and solving these problems from here as I can. It's a beautiful part of the world of Vancouver bc and if you're listening and you haven't been there, I highly recommend checking it out. It's, it's impressive. The, the scale of things up there just all seems to be bigger and just a little bit more beautiful.. It's uh, great place to visit and stay.

Jennifer Henry: 2:21

Yeah, it's it's the mountains and the ocean. All within the same kind of, you know, you turn one way and you see the mountains, you turn the other way and you see the ocean. It's pretty majestic.. Cory Connors: Yes. I recently flew back from Montreal, and I remember as the plane came over, Your neck of the woods in Canada. It was just strikingly different and all beautiful, you know, Canada is just an incredible country, but it was, it's a neat place. So but let's talk about your company and, and what's, what's so sustainable about it. Can you tell us about Perk Eco and what your focus is and, and why we should send you bags of cash so you can keep operating. That'd be great. That'd be great.

Cory Connors: 3:03

Let's do that.. Yeah.

Jennifer Henry: 3:06

First, great dig in. So I've been working in waste innovations and recycling for , a good 10 years before I started this company. And what I saw. Not just in the coffee shop industry, but in so many industries and verticals is that there's a problem in getting the waste from the, it's end of useful life to the right processor.. There's a lot of processors out there that are equipped to divert waste from landfill. And it's different for each waste stream. So we look at packaging, like single use packaging in terms of poly coded paper, for example. We know there are processors that are equipped for this to purchase and recycle this material or accept and recycle this. And they want it in certain volume and they want it prepared a certain way mixed with certain other materials. But the really specific you know, process , to recycle or upcycle or reuse any one specific material and. Whether you're a hair salon, which I worked in with a company called Green Circle Salons for so many years helping them get hair salons on board and recycle their foils and their hair and their chemicals. So there's all these really difficult and very specific waste streams that if you can solve for that logistical problem of getting it from the user to a place where it's prepared, the way the processor wants. And getting it to that processor and funding that logistics, right?. Then there's your ticket and you can talk, you can, you can talk about almost any waste stream that way sometimes the processor doesn't exist and so you need to innovate. Create the end of life solution for it, which is the fun part., that's the nerd out on, like, I love that stuff. And then you become the processor and then you become the hauler, and then you collect from the source. And so there's just, there's a lot of dots to connect here. The coffee shop industry is just the very specific niche that I chose because I saw it as low hanging fruit. We've got coffee cups. That's the star of the show for Perk Eco is the coffee cup, the single use poly coated paper cup Processors exist. Processors want this material getting it to them in a way that they can integrate it into their facility and their processes the way that they want. Near impossible . Yeah, that's cause of contamination. That's because of the fact that here's your regular consumer inside a coffee shop. They've got their cup. There's some stuff in the bottom of it. There's the cream, there's, you know, syrup, there's a teabag, there's milk, there's coffee, whatever it is. And they see a bin. Well, first of all, they see a cup. It may or may not say recyclable. Right. May or may not say compostable on it. Good point. Yeah, it might say nothing on it. So here they are with this product in their hand, some coffee in the bottom of it, probably not quite sure what to do with it because they go over to where the bin is and they're like, okay, here are my options. I see a blue bin. That's where I put recycling things. And is this recyclable here? Not really. What to do, and if it says compostable on it, worse, what if they've got what their options are, recycling bin in a garbage bin and they've got enough in their hand that says compostable and it's got coffee in it. What the heck are they? How is your average consumer supposed to noodle that around in their mind and figure it out in that three seconds where that they have allocated to make that decision?

Cory Connors: 6:42

Oh, very, very true. I was, I was totally impressed with the, the visual on your website that has three cylinders and, and behind each cylinder is exactly what goes in that Exactly.

Jennifer Henry: 6:57

So Tube, it's,

Cory Connors: 7:00

it's a

Jennifer Henry: 7:00

tube part. We eliminated the bin. I, as soon as I started zeroing in on this one waste stream and this one problem. The first thing I realized is that the bin is the problem. If once a coffee cup goes into a bin, whatever is in there becomes a problem and contaminates the other materials. So if there's coffee at the end of the day, what, what ends up happening is the barista goes to the recycling bin, the compost bin, the whatever, you know, waste bin, whatever it is. Then they pick it up, and even if it's recycling and it says, you know, coffee cups and it's very clearly labeled, when they pick it up at the end of the day, there's gonna be someone's fat food bag in there. They're. All sorts of things in that bin. There's sandwiches, there's gum, it's a mess. It's just a big

Cory Connors: 7:46

mess. And so they people are in a hurry. Yeah. Yeah. They don't, they don't pay attention or they don't care? Or, or both.

Jennifer Henry: 7:51

Yeah. Yeah, you're right. And it's just, you know, a, a side effect of our, you know, convenience based modern life. So the barista is left with this bag with a giant coffee puddle at the bottom. If they put that in their recycling dumpster at the. What's the hauler supposed to do with that? It gets landfilled. There's no way that they can process that. So we put the three tubes. We have a three stainless steel tubes. We mount them on the wall. We also have floor based stands and counter based countertop designs. But the wall mounted one is in the popular one, and it's three metal tubes mount on the wall. You pour your coffee into one tube, you stack your cup in the other tube, you stack your lid in the other tube.

Cory Connors: 8:32

B. I have, I have to ask, does the bottom of the, one of the tube that you pour your coffee into, go directly into a drain mm-hmm., or is that, that's something that. They need to deal with somehow.

Jennifer Henry: 8:47

So when the, we always train the baristas that come on board our program, then the coffee shop comes on board. Our program, we train the baristas to, every time you clean your coffee and sugar station, go over to your cup station and just check it. If it's full, you, they just, the cup just pop off the wall and they just tip it into their into their sink. And then at the end of the day, they throw it in their commercial dishwasher.

Cory Connors: 9:10

Wow. That's impress.

Jennifer Henry: 9:11

Thanks. Thanks. Yeah. It's really a simple solution. It's not rocket science, but it's made the difference., it's meant that when we collect the cups from our member coffee shops we get a container full of perfectly sorted stacked and lids with no contamination.

Cory Connors: 9:30

Wonderful. Yeah. And, and they're, like you said, that's a high demand material that bleached paper is beautiful and yes, it has coatings on it, but that can be recycled into more great paper products.

Jennifer Henry: 9:44

Mm-hmm. it can, it is so long as it's delivered to the processors in the right way. And that's, that's the, that's kind of the, you know, problem one that we.

Cory Connors: 9:54

Excellent. And, and how's it going so far? I mean, if, how long have you been doing this? What's, what's some, some data you can share with us?

Jennifer Henry: 10:03

Mm-hmm.. Yeah. So what we know is that The primary thing we know that we've experienced because we launched on Earth Day in 2020.

Cory Connors: 10:13

Oh, perfect.. Jennifer Henry: Yeah. As the pandemic hit that was our launch date and literally the week that we launched, and I'd been working on developing the company for six months prior, but I was like, we're gonna go ahead with this launch the week that we launched coffee shops in the Vancouver area. Were mandated to close ? No. All of our beta testers that had signed on were closed. There was no waste to pick up. They were closed. And so here we are with this company going, holy smokes,. Yeah, we've done, I guess we're hitting pause for a while. So we had a really interesting pandemic pivot. And that was the coffee roasters were all going strong because people were all of a sudden ordering the beans to their home. Right? The coffee roasters were pivoting. They were like, oh, we're gonna do home delivery service now. We're gonna stop, you know, delivering to the coffee shops and we're gonna deliver directly to the homes. And so we started working with some coffee roasters who said, Hey, we have this waste stream called, they call it chaff. And it's the bean that flakes, that flakes off of the coffee beam when it's in the roaster. So the beans go in, they're all green and grayish, and it roasts up nice and brown. And then this little skin, this husk flakes off the outside of the bean , goes through this bucket and they, I had no idea. Yeah. Who did? And so it's this fluffy, fragrant coffee smelling, dry resilient material that is all nicely separated into a bucket and. Coffee roasters were saying to me, Hey, can you compost this? And I was like, well, this is an organic material. Yes, we accept compost. We even accept the compostable packaging. Yeah, we'll take that. And as soon as I got my hands on one of the bags of these things, I was just instantly like, this is a beautiful material. This is not waste. This is not even compost. This has a higher and better use. So we took our pandemic time, the time that we were kind of mandated to not even you. Be able to serve with our customers. We took that time to innovate a new solution for that waste stream. And so we really focused on what is this stuff? How can it be used, what are the properties of it? What are the pH, what are the fertilizer values? What are, can it, is it edible? And we did a lot of testing on it. We. Distilled it. We made tea out of it, we baked it, we briqueted it, we burned it. briqueted it. That's the first I'm gonna write that down. That's a . That's that's a new phrase. I love it.

Jennifer Henry: 12:52

Oh, we did so much. This material. We really, and it's a prolific waste stream for, they produce a lot of it. It's fluffy and airy. It takes up a lot. It's, it's very lightweight and takes up a lot of space. It's fluffy and so, What we ended up doing was we, it's powdery as well. We screen it, we sif the powder out of.. And we take the powder out, which is heavier, denser and we use, we sell that as a it's a, a agricultural soil amendment product that can is a mild fertilizer. PH is 5.19 and fertilizer value is two 11. And so it has value the provider. We discovered that it has the properties of repelling slugs, organic slug repellent. So dual purpose, kinda agricultural product. But the even better part of it, and this has been the most successful part of this pandemic pivot, is that the fluffy stuff. So we filter the powder out and we keep, take the fluffy stuff and we use it as a, a stuffing for pet beds. So we use textile waste. We get off dead stock textiles and we make pet beds and we're selling our coffee chaff pet beds in pet stores across Western Canada now coffee, it smells great. Dogs don't wanna chew it. It's the whole circular economy product that we didn't anticipate creating, but it, it, it's our pandemic product. We did it, it's a success and it got us through that time. To the other side of it where we were able to start onboarding coffee shops again, which is kinda where your question started. Wow. Where we're, we're now collecting waste from 15 coffee shops in, in Western Canada.

Cory Connors: 14:36

That's amazing. And, and selling dog beds with coffee chef. Wow. Is that in the same, is that under the same perk eco umbrella, or you haven't, okay, so that's, Two, you're serving two very different kinds of markets with the same company. Brilliant. I love it. Yeah.

Jennifer Henry: 14:57

Well, we are a waste diversion company and, and the ultimate goal is to, to develop circular products. So it didn't make sense for us to kind of take this portion of the company and break it off into like a pet, you know, version of the company. Sure. We curricular economy.

Cory Connors: 15:13

I love it. And the, the companies that recycle the, let's talk about the three waste streams. So, or so you've got the liquid that you said that gets dumped down the drain, which makes sense. The cups go to a paper mill to be ground up and turn back into packaging material or new cups, or do you know specifically?

Jennifer Henry: 15:35

Yeah. Right now magazines and. Wow,

Cory Connors: 15:38

that's awesome. And then the lids are pvc, is that correct?

Jennifer Henry: 15:44

The lids are usually polystyrene. Oh, good. Yeah, so they're e each batch of lid lids are, are different. We do have to hand separate. But I'll go to an amazing, an innovator plastics processor we have here BC called Merlin Plastic. And Merlin is just fantastic in terms of their, the breadth of materials that they accept and what they do with them and how innovative they are. So we, we were really lucky to have them here. That's great.

Cory Connors: 16:15

Holly Styrene is very recyclable, and like you said, it's, it's about connecting the dots and getting the material sorted and collected and to the right people to do the right things with. So well done. Good for you. What's what's the future for, for Perk Eco?

Jennifer Henry: 16:34

Yeah, we need more coffee shops on board because of the pandemic Coffee shops had a hard time and we're really sympathetic to that. You know, first, first they dealt with the closures and then they dealt with, you know, having to go, just takeout. And then they dealt with supply chain shortages. We all remember the Great Cup shortage. happening, yeah, not too long ago. And then now we've got, you know, then bean prices, coffee bean prices skyrocket. Now they've got staff shortages. So we're really sympathetic to this and we're really there to make sure that they have waste management when they need it and are able to divert their waste, if at all possible. And we've stepped up with , a really supportive way for them to fund this. So here in Metro Vancouver, we have a 25 cent eco fee mandatory mandated by the city, 25 cent eco fee on each single use cup sold.. We've done the homework and is made sure that it's okay for coffee shops in all of in other regions in North America to implement the St. Kopi voluntarily. So we teach them how to implement a 25 cent eCopy on each single use cup. They sell that new revenue that comes into their coffee shop, supports their recycling program, supports per kco, so they're never out of pocket for our program. And that's the message we're trying to get out here is hey, coffee shops. We can serve you anywhere, any zipper postal code because we do our collections via carbon offset hybrid U p s. UPS does our pickups for us. We send the coffee shop an empty container. They fill it with cups and lids, coffee bean bags, pastry bags anything co composable or recyclable. We take it and when they're ready for a pickup, sometimes at some coffee shops, we need to pick up every single, every single day or, or twice a week. And some of them, some of the tiny ones just need up to once a month, so we pick up as needed. So they let us know, Hey, we're ready for a pickup. We dispatch, U P S U P S picks up same day or next day and brings it to us for hand sorting in Vancouver, where we have all these amazing processors. Wow. So we need more on board and we need to get the message out to them that you are not going to have to pay extra for this because we're giving you a meaningful way to showcase your customers that you are diverting 90% of your waste from landfill, and doing so using the eco. On their single use cup, they can choose to avoid that eco fee by bringing in their travel mug or choosing a ceramic mug. So, but we know in our convenience based society, there will still be so many people who are just gonna go, you know what? It's worth the 25 cents to me. Yeah. Have the convenience. And so it's less than 4% change. Behavior change. We know this when we implemented 25 cent eco fee. That will change the minds of less than 4% of coffee shop customers, north American Coffee Shop customers. And so they'll see a slight reduction in the the single youth packaging. But for the most part, their customers will still partake in that, the convenience of the single youth cup and they will amazing money funds, meaningful, positive, green change at the end of life for those material.

Cory Connors: 19:48

Wow, that's impressive. And. Frankly, it's totally innovative and it, it just exciting. So thank you for, for stepping up to do that. If you're listening to this program, please reach out to your local coffee shop and have them contact Jennifer and her team at Per eco. Anything else that we can do to support your mission here?

Jennifer Henry: 20:08

That's it. Tell your coffee shop and get on board. That's it. Yeah. Yeah.

Cory Connors: 20:13

Well, there's some, some great coffee companies that are looking for solutions to this problem. I know that for sure. And I think your business is getting ready to grow soon. So that's good news. So well done and keep up the good work. Anything that I didn't ask you that you wish I would've?

Jennifer Henry: 20:31

No, I think you covered it. You got it all. You

Cory Connors: 20:33

did a good job, . Thank you so much. Thank you Landsberg Orora for sponsoring this podcast. If you're listening, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss an ex, ex episode, and stay tuned for more. Thank you, Jennifer. Thank

Jennifer Henry: 20:45

you. Take care.