I have decided to dedicate my blogging to the real struggles that all of us face as we try so hard to incorporate sustainability into our businesses and our lives.  So much of what I have read about sustainability makes it sound like it is as simple as changing your light bulb, and makes me feel like I am some kind of an evil antigreenie for not being Ubergreen.  I have struggled with sustainability for fifteen years in my business, Dean's Beans Organic Coffee and for a decade before that as an environmental and indigenous rights lawyer.  I know that few of the choices are easy, although the self promotion of many so-called green companies would lead you to believe otherwise.

I am hoping that this blog will allow a breath of fresh air into the dialogue, as we spill our guts about the real struggles around being green. Let's get crankin'!

So we are organic fair trade coffee roasters.  We try our darnedest to reflect our highest values in all of our decision making, and if we try something and it either doesn't work, or falls short f the mark we have two choices - cover it up with marketing or face it and try again.  That brings us to air quality.  For many years as a pipsqueak or "garage" roaster (that's the slur in the trade for small scale roasters) we didn't have to do anything about our air emissions. Cooking coffee emits smoke, small particles and heat, but at a small scale it barely makes it into your neighbor's yard, and depending on whether or not they like coffee, it is either a minor nuisance or a delight.  But as you grow, the regulations and common respect for the neighbors kick in. At about a thousand pounds of roasting per week, the EPA starts to demand treatment of the emissions. Well enough, so we bought and installed an "afterburner", which is nothing more than a natural gas fired incinerator that completely obliterates the smoke and the smell.  It is expensive to purchase and even more expensive to run, but that is the standard in the industry. Also, we had neighbors with asthma, and the smoke affected their ability to breathe. 

One day I went outside and noticed the effects of the afterburner - we were sending up a heat plume of one million BTU's, burning an immense hole in the ozone layer right above Dean's Beans!  I thought, okay, I am being green by incinerating the emissions and preventing one form of pollution, but I am exacerbating global warming!  I did a ton of research on-line and asked professional friends, only to discover there wasn't an alternative, either pollute or destroy.  I decided to research how the big nasties (like coal fired power plants) dealt with emissions and soon discovered the combination of wet scrubber and electrostatic precipitation (that's a shower and a bug zapper in humanspeak).  I contacted several engineers and even received help from NASA scientists, who all told me we couldn't scale the technology down.  We were undeterred, designed our own model, tested it on a small scale, got approval from the local Board of Health and spent forty thousand dollars building a big one and a building around it.  It is a real Rube Goldberg contraption that bathes the smoke in a shower stream of recirculating water, then zaps any remaining particles in the precipitator.  It seemed to do the trick, and we were proud of our ability to think outside the box and get the job done.

Except it didn't work as well as we thought, and got overwhelmed by the smoke from our big roasting machine.  The neighbors began to complain again, and everything we did to tweak the unit created a problem somewhere else (backfires in the roasters, smoke all over the roasting room, lengthened roasting times).  We are forging ahead, redoing this and repiping that.  I think we can lick all of the problems, but it is taking time and more money. It ain't easy being green.

So this tale doesn't have a happy green ending, not yet. But I think it illustrates some of the strugles those of us have who are really trying to move sustainability deep into the core of our businesses.  In future blogs, I want to explore third world sourcing, organics, fair trade, cups, packaging and all the other nuts and bolts that must be dealt with in making sustainability an on-the-ground reality instead of a marketing gimmick.  Stay tuned and please comment - we can take it!

Dean Cycon

CEO

Dean's Beans Organic Coffee Company 

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