10 Ways to Make Your Café More Environmentally Friendly
Jan 12, 2026
Your customers care about the environment. And increasingly, they're choosing where to spend their money based on which businesses share those values.
This isn't a passing trend. Research consistently shows that the majority of consumers prefer to support brands that demonstrate genuine commitment to sustainability. For cafés and coffee shops, this creates both an opportunity and an expectation.
The good news? Many eco-friendly changes are surprisingly simple to implement — and several will actually save you money. From cutting water bills to eliminating paper waste, sustainability and profitability often go hand in hand. In fact, many of the most impactful sustainable practices for small businesses — from reducing energy consumption to cutting packaging waste — pay for themselves within months through lower operating costs.
Here are ten practical ways to reduce your café's environmental footprint, build customer loyalty, and run a business you can feel good about.
1. Reduce Your Water Consumption
Cafés use a lot of water. Between coffee machines, dishwashers, cleaning, and customer toilets, daily consumption adds up quickly — and so does the bill.
Small changes make a measurable difference. Low-flow taps and sensor-activated faucets in bathrooms can cut water usage significantly without affecting the customer experience. Water-efficient toilets and urinals offer similar savings.
In the kitchen, ensure your dishwasher is energy-rated and running full loads. Pre-rinsing dishes under a running tap wastes more water than most people realise — a quick scrape into the bin often does the job just as well.
If your café has outdoor seating or a garden area, consider collecting rainwater for plants. It's free, it's sustainable, and customers notice these details.
Quick win: Install tap aerators on all your sinks. They cost a few pounds each, take minutes to fit, and can reduce water flow by up to 50% without any noticeable difference in pressure.
2. Go Digital and Ditch the Paper
Paper menus. Paper loyalty cards. Paper receipts. Paper napkin dispensers overflowing onto the floor. Cafés generate an enormous amount of paper waste — much of it completely avoidable.
Start with your menu. A well-designed chalkboard or digital display eliminates the need for printed menus on every table. If customers want to browse before ordering, a QR code linking to your online menu works perfectly. Most people have their phones out anyway.
Loyalty programmes are another obvious target. Traditional paper punch cards get lost, damaged, and thrown away constantly. Every replacement card is more waste. Digital loyalty cards solve this entirely — customers carry their card on their phone, and you never print another stack of cardboard again. The environmental cost alone makes a compelling case — when you compare paper punch cards versus digital loyalty programmes, the waste generated by printing, losing, and reprinting physical cards adds up to thousands of unnecessary sheets per year for a busy café.
Switching to a digital loyalty platform like Perkstar eliminates paper waste while giving you tools that paper cards never could: push notifications to bring customers back, data on visiting patterns, and automated rewards that run themselves.
Quick win: Replace paper punch cards with digital stamp cards that customers store in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. No app download required, no paper waste, and significantly higher engagement rates.
For items where digital isn't practical — like napkins — look for recycled or compostable alternatives. They're widely available now and often comparable in price to conventional options.
3. Source Locally Whenever Possible
Every ingredient that travels hundreds of miles to reach your café carries a carbon footprint. Shipping, refrigeration, packaging — it all adds up.
Local sourcing flips this equation. When you buy from nearby farms and producers, you reduce transport emissions, support your local economy, and often get fresher, higher-quality ingredients in the process.
Start by mapping what's available near you. Local bakeries for pastries. Nearby dairy farms for milk. Regional roasters for coffee beans. Farmers' markets for seasonal produce. You might be surprised how much you can source within a short radius.
The relationships matter too. When customers see "eggs from [Local Farm Name]" on your menu, it tells a story. It shows you care about where your food comes from — and that authenticity resonates. Many of these same principles apply beyond the café counter — if you also serve meals, eco-friendly restaurant practices like seasonal menu planning and waste-conscious portioning can reduce your carbon footprint and your food costs simultaneously.
If you have any outdoor space, consider growing herbs yourself. A small planter of basil, mint, and rosemary costs almost nothing to maintain and provides fresh ingredients year-round. Customers love seeing it, and it's genuinely useful.
Quick win: Identify your three highest-volume ingredients and research local alternatives. Even switching one or two items makes a meaningful difference.
4. Minimise Food Waste
Food waste is one of the biggest environmental issues in hospitality — and one of the most expensive. Every item you throw away represents money spent on ingredients, preparation, and storage that generated zero return.
Tackling food waste requires attention at every stage. Start with ordering: track what you're actually using versus what you're buying. Many cafés over-order out of habit or fear of running out, then bin the excess at week's end.
In the kitchen, train staff on proper storage and rotation. First in, first out isn't just a phrase — it's the difference between using ingredients at their peak and throwing them away. If your café operates more like a restaurant — with a full kitchen and a varied menu — the waste challenge scales accordingly, and adopting a structured approach to making your restaurant environmentally friendly becomes essential to keeping both costs and emissions under control.
For unavoidable food scraps, composting is straightforward and keeps organic waste out of landfill. Many local councils offer commercial composting collection, or you can partner with nearby farms or community gardens who'll gladly take your coffee grounds, vegetable peelings, and food scraps.
Coffee grounds deserve special mention. They're excellent fertiliser, and many customers will happily take them home for their gardens. A simple sign offering free bags of used grounds costs you nothing and builds goodwill.
End-of-day surplus is trickier, but apps like Too Good To Go let you sell unsold food at a discount rather than binning it. You recover some revenue, reduce waste, and attract new customers who might become regulars.
Quick win: Set up clearly labelled bins for food waste, recycling, and general rubbish. When separation is easy, staff actually do it.
5. Cut Your Energy Usage
Hospitality businesses are energy-intensive. Espresso machines, refrigerators, dishwashers, ovens, lighting, heating, air conditioning — it runs constantly, and the bills reflect it.
Start with the obvious: lighting. If you haven't switched to LED bulbs throughout your café, do it now. The energy savings pay back the cost within months, and LEDs last years longer than traditional bulbs.
Heating and cooling often represent the biggest energy expense. Good insulation makes a dramatic difference — it keeps heat in during winter and out during summer, reducing how hard your HVAC system needs to work. Draught-proofing doors and windows is a quick, cheap improvement.
For equipment, look for energy ratings when replacing appliances. An energy-efficient dishwasher or refrigerator costs slightly more upfront but saves significantly over its lifetime. The same applies to coffee machines — newer models are often far more efficient than older ones.
Staff habits matter too. Turning off equipment that doesn't need to run overnight, closing fridge doors promptly, and not leaving taps running all contribute to lower consumption.
Quick win: Do a walk-through of your café after closing. Note everything that's still running and ask whether it needs to be. You'll likely find easy savings.
6. Switch to Eco-Friendly Cleaning Products
Cleaning products often contain harsh chemicals that wash down drains and into waterways. For a café that cleans constantly — surfaces, floors, dishes, bathrooms — that adds up to a significant environmental impact.
Eco-friendly cleaning products have improved enormously in recent years. Today's plant-based detergents and surface cleaners work just as effectively as their chemical-heavy counterparts, without the environmental downsides.
Buy in bulk where possible. Large containers of concentrated cleaning solution generate far less plastic waste than buying dozens of individual spray bottles. Refillable dispensers for hand soap in bathrooms follow the same logic.
For hand drying, cloth towels that you wash and reuse are more sustainable than paper towels or energy-hungry air dryers. They also feel nicer for customers — a small touch that elevates the experience.
Quick win: Audit your cleaning cupboard. Identify your highest-volume products and research eco-friendly alternatives. Many suppliers now offer sustainable options at competitive prices.
7. Choose Sustainable Furniture and Décor
When it's time to refresh your café's interior, sustainability should factor into your choices. New furniture manufactured from virgin materials carries a significant carbon footprint — and often costs more than the alternatives.
Reclaimed and recycled furniture has become increasingly popular in café design, and for good reason. Vintage tables and chairs add character and uniqueness that flat-pack furniture can't match. Salvage yards, antique markets, and online marketplaces are full of quality pieces waiting for a second life.
If you prefer new items, look for sustainably sourced materials. Bamboo grows rapidly and renewably. FSC-certified wood comes from responsibly managed forests. Recycled metal and plastic keep materials out of landfill.
Beyond furniture, consider your tableware. Ceramic mugs and glasses that you wash and reuse are far more sustainable than disposable cups — and they create a better experience for customers dining in. Encourage customers to ask for a "real" cup if they're staying, rather than defaulting to takeaway packaging.
Quick win: Before buying anything new, ask whether you could find it secondhand. For furniture, décor, and even some equipment, the answer is often yes.
8. Reduce Single-Use Plastics
Plastic straws have become the symbol of café waste, but they're just the start. Takeaway cups, lids, cutlery, stirrers, sauce packets — single-use plastics are everywhere in hospitality.
Eliminating them entirely isn't always realistic, but reducing them dramatically is achievable.
Start with straws. Paper, bamboo, and metal alternatives are widely available. Many cafés now offer straws only on request, which cuts usage significantly — most customers don't actually need one.
For takeaway cups, compostable options made from plant-based materials break down far faster than traditional plastic-lined cups. Better still, incentivise customers to bring reusable cups by offering a small discount. This is where your loyalty programme becomes useful: you can reward sustainable behaviour directly.
With Perkstar, you could create a program where customers earn bonus stamps or points when they bring their own cup. It's a small incentive that encourages exactly the behaviour you want to promote — and customers appreciate being rewarded for doing the right thing. This approach is part of a broader shift toward green loyalty programmes that tie environmental actions directly to customer rewards — turning sustainability from a cost centre into a retention strategy.
Cutlery and packaging for takeaway food can also be switched to compostable or recyclable alternatives. The cost difference has shrunk considerably as these products have become mainstream.
Quick win: Implement a "bring your own cup" discount and promote it with signage at your counter. Even a 10-20p saving motivates behaviour change.
9. Get Your Team Involved
Sustainability initiatives only work when your whole team is on board. A café owner who cares about the environment but employs staff who don't understand or share that commitment will struggle to make real progress.
Start with education. Make sure every team member understands why you're making these changes — not just what they need to do, but the reasoning behind it. People follow through more consistently when they understand the purpose.
Create clear, simple systems. Which bin is for what? How should food waste be handled? What's the process for end-of-day surplus? When the right action is also the easy action, compliance improves dramatically.
Encourage suggestions. Your staff see the day-to-day operations more closely than anyone. They'll spot waste and inefficiency that you might miss, and they'll often have practical ideas for improvement. Create a culture where those ideas are welcomed and acted upon.
Consider assigning a "sustainability lead" — someone on your team who takes ownership of environmental initiatives, monitors progress, and keeps the momentum going. It doesn't need to be a formal role, just someone who cares and pays attention.
Quick win: Add sustainability to your staff training. Five minutes explaining your environmental commitments during onboarding sets the right expectations from day one.
10. Bring Your Customers Along
Your customers want to support sustainable businesses — but they need to know what you're doing and how they can participate.
Don't be shy about communicating your environmental commitments. Share your story on social media. Explain the changes you've made and why. Customers appreciate transparency, and many will choose your café specifically because of your values.
Make it easy for customers to participate. Clear recycling bins. Prominent signage about reusable cup discounts. Information about where your coffee is sourced or how your food waste is composted. The more visible your efforts, the more customers engage with them.
Your loyalty programme is a powerful tool here. Beyond simply rewarding purchases, you can use it to incentivise sustainable behaviour. Bonus points for bringing a reusable cup. Extra stamps for choosing the plant-based option. Even the option to donate loyalty rewards to an environmental charity instead of claiming a free coffee. Tying your loyalty programme to a cause your customers care about is a form of corporate social responsibility that drives growth — it deepens emotional connection to your brand while channelling everyday purchases toward genuine impact.
With Perkstar's push notifications, you can communicate directly with your loyal customers about sustainability initiatives — announcing a new composting partnership, promoting a beach clean-up event, or simply reminding them about your reusable cup discount.
Some cafés go further, hosting community events around environmental causes. Litter picks in local parks. Partnerships with environmental charities. These activities build genuine community connection and position your café as a business that truly cares.
Quick win: Add a line to your menu or chalkboard highlighting one sustainability initiative: "Our coffee grounds go to [Local Community Garden]" or "Ask about our reusable cup discount." Small touches signal big values.
Start Where You Are
You don't need to implement all ten ideas tomorrow. Sustainability is a journey, not a destination. Pick two or three changes that feel achievable right now, implement them properly, and build from there.
Some changes — like switching to digital loyalty cards or installing LED lighting — deliver immediate benefits with minimal effort. Others, like overhauling your supply chain or installing solar panels, require more planning and investment. If you're still handing out cardboard stamp cards, switching to digital loyalty cards instead of paper is one of the fastest wins — it eliminates printing waste immediately while giving you data on who your most loyal customers actually are.
What matters is making progress. Every paper punch card you don't print, every bag of coffee grounds you divert from landfill, every customer you convert to a reusable cup — it all adds up.
And your customers will notice. In a market where consumers increasingly vote with their wallets for businesses that share their values, your commitment to sustainability isn't just good for the planet. Customers who identify with your values don't just visit more often — they spend more over time, effectively increasing their lifetime value to your business while costing you less to retain than new customers cost to acquire. It's good for business.
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