Our commitment to sustainability and dreams of a better world

At BTP we care about the impact we make on the planet. Where we can we try to do things in a better, greener way, whether we’re talking energy consumption or ingredient sourcing to what we do with our waste.

Here are some of the things we do:

Banning single use coffee cups

From 1st June 2018, single use coffee cups are banned in our cafes. Instead, we’re asking customers to bring their own, or borrow one from us as part of our loan scheme. You can read more about why we’ve chosen to do this here.

Green Energy

Switching to green energy supply is the single biggest thing a business can do to fight climate change (the greatest environmental threat facing the world today).

We’re proud to be powered by green energy. We track our energy consumption ensuring that we train our team to switch equipment off overnight and turn off lights to further minimise our carbon footprint. We do the same with water considering the flow rate of our taps, investing in water saving devices where possible and thinking of our actions.

Reuse, Reduce & Recycle

Being a food business making delicious meals from fresh ingredients from scratch, we generate a fair amount of waste.

We monitor wastage levels weekly to minimise excesses but where we have to throw away we do our best to recycle. Our menus are designed that many ingredients can be used for different dishes to reduce the amount of waste in the first place.

Any fit for purpose cakes are donated to FareShare who take this food into organisations working with the most vulnerable people in the community.

We want to reduce the amount of rubbish that goes to landfill, so each of our cafes where we manage our own waste (only three are managed by a third party) are zero to landfill. Everything is recycled.

All of our cafes recycle their food waste, whilst in Bristol we’ve teamed up with Geneco, partnering with them on a new initiative to collect our food waste from all our local cafés with a vehicle powered by biomethane produced through the treatment of our food waste in their anaerobic digestion plant, so a complete cycle. The food waste is also converted into fertiliser.

Straws too are a hot topic – we only use paper straws, and they’re provided on request.

Sourcing

Ethics are as important today as they ever were. Everything we buy is scrutinised to ensure it’s the best choice for us, our customer and the environment.

Amongst many things that we do in this area, we always have and always will use free range meat and eggs. We only use organic milk and have full traceability of all the products we use born out of long standing relationships with our suppliers.

Find out more about our sourcing on our Better Relationships page.

Communities

We want to make things better in the local communities we serve, and to put society and people at the core of our thinking. We also believe in using our business as a force for good.

With this in mind, we’ve teamed up with Good For Nothing – the creative generosity network who make it fun, simple and sociable to make positive stuff happen in local communities.

To start with, we’ve set up Good For Nothing ‘Chapters’ in Bristol, Bath and Exeter. A Chapter is a regular meet up, where we work together to make good stuff happen for the people that need it, and we’re calling out to you to come on this journey with us. Find out more and see when the Chapters meet here >

We want to work with our communities in other ways too, with our cafe managers encouraged to build long-term relationships with schools, community groups and residents around their cafes. We are happy to host local events or support events as best we can, so please contact your local cafe with information and we can see how we can help.

Whilst we do a lot, we are always looking at ways of doing more, so do feel free to get in touch with further suggestions on areas

As a nice summary, here is our Sustainability Policy: