If you’ve spent any time at a coffee roasting facility, you’ve no doubt come across GrainPro bags, the greenish bags inside the traditional jute bags that green coffee gets shipped from continent to continent to roastery in. These plastic bags hermetically seal in green coffee, keeping out contaminants and helping the unroasted coffee maintain freshness and moisture longer. But they are, for all intents and purposes, one-time use plastic, which isn’t great. A necessary evil, but not ideal nonetheless.
That’s why Neumann Gruppe USA has teamed up with GrainPro to create an all-new recycling solution for used GrainPro and other plastic green coffee bag liners.
Neumann Gruppe USA, the American branch of Neumann Kaffee Gruppe that includes InterAmerican Coffee, Rothfos Corporation, and Atlas Coffee Importers, has opened up participation in the program to all roasters and importers, regardless of affiliation with NKG/NGUS. Along with GrainPro, Neumann Gruppe USA has brought on Continental Terminals, a US-based warehousing company to act as the nexus point for the recycling efforts.
To participate, all roasters have to do is send an email to sustainability@grainpro.com for more detail. Then, they can mail or deliver in person any and all clean, empty GrainPro, TranSafeliners, and any “other liners used in the chemical-free preservation of premium coffee beans” to either of Continental Terminals’ Keasbey, NJ or Alameda, CA locations to then be sent on for appropriate recycling. Deliveries can be made using whatever delivery service the sender prefers: USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc.
“It’s our goal to be a responsible partner and leader in the green coffee industry, which means guiding the way toward improved sustainability,” said Nicolas Rueda, CEO of Neumann Gruppe USA. “We’re delighted to encourage the success of this effort by communicating its availability to our clients and networks.”
While it might seem like a small act, recycling liner bags can have a big impact. Americans consume around an estimated 1.6 Billion pounds of coffee each year, conservatively equating to roughly over 12 million 60kg bags of green coffee (not including roast loss, which would make that number even higher). The new recycling program has the capacity to keep 12 million liner bags from going to a landfill each year, which is anything but insignificant. For more information on the program, visit GrainPro’s official website.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
