After Pemberton Valley supermarket launched their Boomerang Bag initiative back in March 2018 – offering re-usable and returnable cloth bags to all customers who may have forgotten their own – MCCC decided it was high time to offer something similar to our coffee-loving customers.
Pemberton seemed a good fit for the four-year-old Australian bag initiative, that tackles plastic pollution by upcycling old textiles into reusable bags and making them available for people to borrow from their local store or market. Frances Dickinson, a textile artist who has run her own business since graduating from art school in 2003, took to her sewing machine to start creating Boomerang bags, with the help of the local Pemby community. Dickinson hosted eight two-hour sewing circles at her house with many people responding to the invitation, bringing their own sewing machines, old fabric, kids, or wine, along for a session or more. Bogs Fabrics, the Re Use It Centre Pemberton and Shayne May all donated fabric, with Leah Daling contributing the old Village of Pemberton banners that she had collected.
With such a successful response to the Boomerang Bag campaign, in October 2018 at our Pemberton branch, we amassed a collection of colourful second hand mugs from Pemberton Re-Usit Centre, which now sit in a box behind the counter and are available for all customers to enjoy their coffee in and bring back the next time they visit us, to help avoid over-using our paper take-away cups. A few weeks later, a host of white china mugs were delivered to our Whistler branch with the logo ‘#bringyourownmug on one side, and ‘No Trees Were Harmed In The Making Of This Mug’ printed on the other. Customers are always stoked to be able to take away a china mug if they’ve forgotten their own travel mug, and have been good at bringing them back too! What’s more, if you use a travel or Boomerang mug, we offer 0.20$ off your coffee, which can make for a big saving over a few weeks, especially if you’re coming in every day like most of our lovely locals! We much prefer offering this incentive rather than pass the paper cup cost onto our customers, as some coffee shops choose to do.
Despite all of our Ingeo™ paper cups at both branches being BPI compostable, 100% biodegradable and made from 100% renewable resource, we’re keen to lower the usage of these as they still have an environmental impact when considering the transportation and packaging needed to get them to us. Ingeo™ in the U.S. comes largely from corn. The reason for this is simple: the U.S grow the most corn of any nation on the planet. But because of the large-scale agricultural system in place today, most (88%) of U.S. corn is genetically modified (GM). You can learn more about Ingeo cups here.
So we’re asking all our Whistler and Pemberton customers to help us and join in with the Boomerang Mug initiative! If you can’t see a Boomrang mug on or near the counter, just ask one of our staff who will be happy to find one for you!
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