Glasgow Coffee Roasters Dear Green are Putting the Environment at the Top of the Agenda
Named after its hometown, the environmentally conscious roastery has been serving organic brews to Glaswegian coffee lovers for a decade.
Since emerging onto the city’s coffee scene in 2011, ‘Dear Green’ has been doling out its specialty grade beans to cafés, bars, and restaurants by the dozen. With a firm belief that good coffee shouldn’t harm the planet, the organisation’s forward-thinking attitude towards the climate is prevalent in its daily routine.
At the helm of Dear Green is founder Lisa Lawson, whose interest in roasting organic coffee cropped up after an eye-opening stay down under revealed what Scottish brews sorely missed.
Lawson said: “After I finished university, I worked in Australia for three years. I got a job for ten bucks an hour in Sydney, where I packed coffee beans in a garage for a deli. I got back to Glasgow in 2002, and there was just no coffee I liked.
“I think in Australia the coffee market was more developed. They had this historic culture of Greeks and Italians who had brought coffee culture over after settling there. Glasgow, at the time, was like tea out of polystyrene cups.”
Drawing on lessons learned from her time in Australia, nine years on, Lawson was able to ingrain equally praiseworthy practices into Dear Green’s code of ethics, which underpins their business model to this day.
She said: “I learned a lot in Australia. Seeing that a business can be built from grass roots passion and hard work is a really big lesson I took back to the UK with me. Everyone should travel because there’s always something to learn from another country.
“I think there was just a bit of an education gap in the UK about coffee, so that meant Australia were further ahead when it came to brewing. At the time, there was much more of an environmental awareness in everybody’s daily life, in Australia, especially in the cities.”
The company’s roastery and showroom is based in the Glasgow Collective, an 8000sqft co-working space in the city’s East End. It’s where Dear Green roasts coffee, trains employees, manages their online shop, and packages products.
Since establishing their headquarters in 2015, Lawson and co. have transformed the space into a green sanctuary. They use only eco-friendly appliances, staff are encouraged to walk or cycle to work, and, where possible, they’ll use second-hand machinery.
Lawson said: “We took on the unit we’re in six years ago. It was a shell unit, so we were able to put in all the services ourselves. It’s got LED lighting, it’s got sensors on lights, we have thermostats on our heating.”
Dear Green takes pride in sourcing and roasting ‘only the highest quality of specialty grade coffee’, while maintaining ‘an ethical and social conscience’. The company also tries to give back to the community, by repurposing excess product that would’ve otherwise been sent to landfill.
Lawson said: “From day one, we’ve been selling our unused coffee sacks online for a pound, and then donating the money to a charity in Ethiopia called ‘Girls Gotta Run’, which creates running clubs for young women, and provides them with trainers.
“We also have coffee chaff from our roasting process which collects a whole sack every day, so we give that to places like ‘Greenheart Growers’ and the ‘Wash House Garden’, who use it to create compost for community gardens.”
The Dear Green Coffee team
Packaging is also a key issue for Dear Green, who hosted the world’s first disposable cup-free coffee festival, back in 2018.
As it stands, the UK throws away around 2.5bn disposable cups a year, accounting for 152,000 tons of the country’s carbon dioxide. According to a 2018 report by WWF, this number is set to rise 33% by 2030.
Lawson said: “Our packaging has been one of the biggest problems since day one. We’ve researched how we can do better for ten years, and the answer is to have no packaging at all, it’ll always end up somewhere bad.
“A good lesson is to use a reusable cup, and then you can save yourself 365 plastic or paper cups a year! Use a reusable tub for lunch. It’s all about making it apart of your everyday habits.”
Dear Green’s commitment towards the environment hasn’t went unnoticed. The roastery became B-Corp certified in January, and, earlier this month, won the ‘Green Champion Award’ at the Glasgow Business Awards 2021. They’ll also have a role to play selling coffee at Glasgow’s COP26.
Lawson said: “Dear Green Coffee will have a presence at the COP, we’ll be supplying a couple of companies with coffee and helping out clients.
“I think the COP is a once in a lifetime event that will change the world, but I really hope it doesn’t create a crazy amount of waste. A huge concern for me is that not all involved will be thinking environmentally. I just hope a big event like this can be a great showcase for our city.”