Seattle Chocolate Sustainability Progress Report 🌎🌲

When we announced our Carbon Neutral status and sustainability goals in January, we promised to bring you along for the journey - and as 2023 flies by, we figured it’s time for a report on this year’s progress and new initiatives.

Our waste has been reduced by 7.23 tons in the first half of the year!

• YTD we have increased composting by 52%, including composting food waste in staff kitchens and paper towels in all bathrooms. So far this year, we’ve composted 13 tons of waste!
• PPEs like gloves and hairnets (very important in a food facility) are now being recycled - we expect to recycle 300 lbs this year, which is more than 30,000 hairnets and gloves no longer headed for the landfill.
• We also began an exciting new program to recycle common plastic items like shopping bags, food packaging, shipping envelopes, bubble wrap, and more which cannot go in curbside recycling. Between our facility’s uses and inviting our employees to recycle materials from home, we’re on track to recycle an additional 37 tons of plastic this year!
• We streamlined the way we package chocolate for delivery when transporting to our two retail stores, drastically reducing the cardboard (and labor) needed - we expect to use 15,000 lbs less cardboard because of this initiative.
• Nut butters arrive to our factory in large plastic buckets, which previously had to go to the landfill. We worked with our recycler to find a way to recycle them instead, which means about 400 buckets a year are now being given a second life!

As another way to reduce waste, 5,517 pounds of imperfect factory seconds have made their way from our Flagship Store to happy homes so far this year. All chocolate scraps from production are also composted.

We switched to 100% renewable natural gas through Puget Sound Energy. By participating in their program, we lower our carbon footprint and support renewable energy projects throughout the Northwest.

Between birthday celebrations, new employee welcomes, new babies and more, we’ve planted 500 trees through One Tree Planted so far this year! Trees help clean the air we breathe, filter the water we drink, and provide habitat to over 80% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity.

Through one of our carbon offset partners, Nori, we’ve removed 500 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere while supporting their regenerative agriculture projects.

Last but certainly not least, we were proud to win Recycler of the Year in our hometown of Tukwila!

Making our shipping process greener - so you can receive your chocolate packages in the most sustainable way possible.

Looking into alternative energy sources to fuel our factory.

Calculating our current carbon footprint and ensuring the sustainability goals we have in place for the future are attainable and accurate.

Visit seattlechocolate.com for more detail!