Surely it must be possible to run a small business and do the right thing?
We are trying our best but any suggestions do please let us know. Here is what we do so far:
Organic
All of our ingredients are farmed with the soil ecosystem in mind. We like the biodynamic principle of helping nature by putting more back into the soil than you take out. We use Crowdfarming which means we can buy direct from organic farms. Our ingredients are always delivered by road – no air miles allowed! We even adopt individual citrus trees on farms so that farmers know that they can rely on us to buy their produce in the year ahead.
Re-use over recycling
We encourage you to return your rinsed glass bottles. We sterilise these in our purpose built washer ready for re-use. Please do rinse out your empties as otherwise the very alive kombucha will form a new little scoby which once dried-in is very hard to remove from your bottle – these can then only be recycled.
At farmer’s markets and some shops most of our customers now return their empties. We tried to do the maths once. It’s a bit ‘back of an envelope’ but we reckoned you and little Buddy K are saving nearly a ton of CO2 a year by re-using your bottles rather than recycling.
We can’t re-use caps for hygiene reasons. Please separate the plastic seal from the cap and recycle both at home.
Unfortunately we can’t take back glass bottles from online sales – sadly the CO2 from the extra road miles defeats the purpose. Please recycle these.
No single use plastic and no waste
We are no petrochemical fans. Yes, some plastics are essential but let’s pare it down to just those. And we do have to fess up! – the sealing rings on our bottle caps are plastic. I know. We don’t like it either. However they are simple to separate from the cap and can be recycled in your plastic waste. Although other caps are available with metal sealing rings, the ring remains on the bottle on opening which means we can’t re-use the bottle.
Labels – another plastic problem
Nearly all other bottle labels have acrylic plastic in their adhesive, many labels also contain plastic. At Buddy we use a 100% paper label sourced from a lovely old Italian company and to dodge the plastic in glues, we commissioned an Italian manufacturer to build us a retro 1970s wet labelling machine. We use this every week with our home made glue which is based on potatoes. Might sound daft but it works well – our labels wash off our bottles with just a little warm soapy water.
Coming soon – subscription kombucha
Zero CO2 subscription deliveries is the goal.
We have finally have our electric van so can now make CO2 free deliveries around Scotland. Our next plan is to introduce a subscription scheme, so can pick up your empties every time we deliver your new booch – we hope to trial this in central Scotland soon. Watch this space and let us know if you are interested – we are very excited about this one.