Mission Packaging
We hope you already know we take sustainability really seriously here at Mission. And, with our commitment to sustainability, we need to be transparent when we haven’t got things quite right.
On this note, unfortunately we made a mistake with our most recent order of branded boxes. Whilst they look absolutely lovely, sadly we failed to do our due diligence and specify clearly enough to our supplier on what kind of printing type and material we wanted. This means that our boxes turned out to be not recyclable.
Why are the boxes not recyclable?
The boxes are printed with a thin matte OPP film on cardboard. OPP film in itself is recyclable in many places, but the mix of materials means that you would have to peel the film off the cardboard (which is a very tedious task) to recycle the two materials separately.
Obviously, this is a bit much to ask of you. But, it is incredibly important to us to make sure we give you this information so that you don’t accidentally contaminate your usual recycling.
Why are we still using the boxes if they can’t be recycled?
One of the options, when we realised our mistake, was to send this whole order back to our supplier. But we knew that this would mean that the boxes would end up in landfill, having served no purpose whatsoever. We also quite quickly came to the understanding that sending these boxes back, along with the impact of creating a new order from scratch would double the associated emissions and impact of our silly mistake. So that was not really an option.
Swallowing our pride and using these boxes despite them not being what we imagined, means that at least they serve a purpose and get you your coffee safely before they meet their natural end.
Sustainability at Mission in the future
To further our work on our own responsibility to be better as a business we are in the process of conducting a full review of our current practices, suppliers and policy on sustainability. We know we aren’t perfect but we are working hard to reduce our impact environmentally and plan to release our first ever full transparency report to hold ourselves accountable to our future goals.
We’ve already made significant changes this year such as increasing the size of our electric delivery van to allow more of our wholesale deliveries to be made via electric vehicle in our circular bucket system. Rest assured there's plenty more we plan to do to continue this work and you'll be able to read all about it very soon.
Thank you as always for choosing to stay caffeinated with our delicious beans, we really do appreciate it.
