Juneau’s local organic coffee roaster recently made it’s first quarterly carbon offset payment to the Juneau Carbon Offset Fund! Sentinel Coffee, already known for its strong embrace of sustainable business practices, is now a regular player in the growing practice of carbon offsetting.

From their website: “Sentinel Coffee is always organic. We believe in protecting the health of not only the farm workers that produce our great coffee, but also the environment in which our coffee grows. Much of our coffee is purchased from farmer-owned cooperatives. Additionally, we roast with electricity, produced with hydro power, to avoid using fossil fuels in our process. We then deliver our coffee in a fully electric vehicle to further cut fuel use. To account for the impact of shipping beans to Alaska, we offset carbon emissions with the Juneau Carbon Offset Fund.“

Also from their website: “Additionally, we roast with electricity, produced with hydro power, to avoid using fossil fuels in our process. We then deliver our coffee in a fully electric vehicle to further cut fuel use. To account for the impact of shipping beans to Alaska, we offset carbon emissions with the Juneau Carbon Offset Fund.“

Sentinel Coffee’s David Thomas realized that one area where his business was having an impact that presented a sustainability challenge was the transport of green coffee beans. Each year, AK Marine Lines moves hundreds of pounds of Sentinel’s beans from the Pacific Northwest to Juneau. We calculated the carbon cost of one pound of barged beans to be $0.17/lb. Sentinel Coffee adds this fee to their sales and passes that money on to the Juneau Carbon Offset Fund.

With the bulk of Juneau’s consumer goods arriving by barge, Sentinel is not alone in having this impact. Nearly all local businesses have the option to choose to take charge of this shipping impact and if interested, we can help them to derive a fairly accurate estimate of its cost. If these costs are then directed to the Juneau Carbon Offset Fund, local carbon emissions will be reduced and local families will see their annual heating bills reduced.

To date, the Juneau Carbon Offset Fund has reached into the homes of six Juneau families, helping them to make the cost-saving and carbon-eliminating switch from oil heat to the drawing of heat from a hydroelectricity-powered air source heat pump. In total, we estimate that these 6 heat pump installations are eliminating 3300 gallons of oil annually, a volume that would produce nearly 74,000 pounds of carbon dioxide.

On a personal note, I have been a customer of Sentinel Coffee from the get-go, actually since Jane and Jeff Hill created Juanita’s Coffee, the biz that eventually became Sentinel Coffee. I think we’re talking nearly 20 years here! My favorite bean? Inca Gold, dark roast. Oh my…so wonderful!