Sitting at the heart of the Blue Earth Summit is our aim to harness the power of the outdoors to bring people together to build a more positive future for our planet. Our partners, Aqua Libra and Jimmy’s Iced Coffee, did just that when they met at the Blue Earth Summit last year and hatched a collaboration to measure the impact of an average workplace’s waste usage whilst increasing their team water intake.
The benefits of the Aqua Libra Flavour Tap is that it not only reduces the amount of single use plastic bottles used across workplaces (around 23,000), but it offers up a sugar free flavoursome drinks factory that has been shrunk down to the size of a small (60cm) kitchen cupboard. Each 500ml flavour cartridge is made with fully recyclable materials and replaces the use of a thousand 500ml bottles.
At Blue Earth Summit in 2022, Aqua Libra served over 1,200 flavoured drinks from their tap to hundreds of businesses and networks – if you scale that up to a typical 5-year unit installation, that’s the potential for over 1 million plastic bottles to be avoided. To take this further, Aqua Libra installed a Flavour Tap at the offices of Jimmy’s Iced Coffee and they have been working together to track the data.
With Jimmy’s Iced Coffee proudly sporting their BCorp certification, they’ve already worked hard to reduce the amount of plastic in their packaging and remove single-use plastics at their offices. Therefore, the main benefit to having a tap installed for them was to get the team drinking more water and reducing the amount of sugar, calories and preservatives consumed each day.
And drink more water they did! Measuring just flavoured serves, in just 41 days the team at Jimmy’s Iced Coffee would have saved 267 KG of finished drinks (or 44 cases of 12), which is equivalent to over five hundred 500ml drinks. Over 5 years, that would equate to 12 tons of finished drinks that don’t need to be transported. So, in this case study alone it’s the equivalent weight of four pick-up trucks!
Workplaces have a unique ability to shift behaviour change on their sites, so the Aqua Libra team are starting in offices and moving out to more open channels such as retail. Although the team at Jimmy’s Iced Coffee are already setting the bar for reducing waste, they were keen to help the team at Aqua Libra measure genuine impact within a workplace to encourage more businesses to think about their plastic consumption, and so they offered their HQ as a site to measure the longer-term impact of an installation.
“As usual the guys from Jimmy’s Iced Coffee are being awesome, super engaged and absolutely smashing it – if we took just the flavoured serves that they’ve drunk and measured it against average workplace plastic consumption, they’ve already eliminated the need for 267KG of finished drinks to be transported around the country, not to mention the packaging etc that goes with all of that” says Malcolm McDermott from Aqua Libra.
And the team at Jimmy’s are more than happy with their new team hydration station. “I’ve been a fan of Aqua Libra since I could pick up their cans in store, so to be able to have it on tap at work has been a dream come true. I really dig sparkling water too, and to have four sugar free flavours on tap has been a treat. Aside from all the great environmental savings, it’s also a great way for the team to stay hydrated, as both the still and sparkling water is filtered, cooled and ready to go 24/7 – we love it!” says Jim from Jimmy’s Iced Coffee.
Linley Lewis, Co-Founder of Blue Earth said “We bring like-minded people together and connections are made at talks and workshops as well as informally at The Wave over coffee, a beer or a surf. We are already seeing results, ranging from multimillion-pound investments in sustainable start-ups to data-led pilot projects like this one. It’s a great example of what the Blue Earth community is all about.“
And…if anyone wanted to really get into the data, the favourite flavour in the Jimmy’s Iced Coffee HQ is clear: Mango!
