Our Green Team Beating Bottles

The Green Team is a very recent venture here at Black Market Roasters. It's a little initiative of our business to implement sustainable business practices and do our part for the Earth. As part of this, some of our team attended collected rubbish for Clean Up Australia Day earlier this month to help keep our waterways clean. With our office located at our store down in Thirroul on the gorgeous South Coast, we want to get involved with our Illawarra community and take part in initiatives with a positive environmental impact. The Boomerang Alliance have recently started rolling out the 'Plastic Free Wollongong' initiative and have been running events in the local area. On Clean Up Australia day on 4th March, together with Sydney Water they hosted a clean-up at North Wollongong Beach called 'Beat the Bottle'. Black Market Roasters was part of the over 100 volunteers who showed up to clean the iconic Wollongong harbour area, donning our gloves and collecting rubbish in a big hessian bag. There were a hundreds of cigarette butts and plastic bottles. Altogether, everyone collected about 215 kg of rubbish that would have otherwise run straight into our ocean - and that's just from that small area of land! Globally, 95% of single-use plastic items are used once and then discarded as waste. We are trying to make a conscious effort to reduce this wastage by sourcing alternatives to these plastic products, and already take measures such as selling reusable coffee cups and use paper straws and utensils for take-away food items. We think the Plastic Free initiative is an awesome one to get behind, and should be rolled out all over Australia! We'll be continuing to get involved in their events and help make our local environment more sustainable, but for now if we do have waste, we're making sure it goes where it needs to prevent it from clogging up our oceans and damaging our marine life. Have a suggestion for us that you would like to see implemented in our cafes? Send us an email to operations@blackmarketroasters.com.au.