This whole campus the penin campus is oriented towards research on environment sustainability and we’re in a fantastic Place both in terms of the geography of the place but also the entrepreneurial culture and and a very very strong understanding between the connection between industry and our kind of beautiful environment so that’s what um.
The business school in Cornwall really presents to me it’s it’s a combination of both kind of environmental and sustainable responsibility but also a proper understanding of how business can play out in that in that uh context so through the various research and impact projects that we have we work with local businesses in cornall in the.
Hours of silly and further a field and a lot of our research is bespoke so it’s based on the challenges that they have within their business and how we can use research to inform their strategies for the future so what we’re able to do with our researches is we’re able to do detailed analysis we’re able to look at the respective uh cost benefit and harm.
As an example or the the relative economic benefits or the relative environmental benefits the relative social benefits um and present this in a simple and straightforward way to the businesses to help them make their own decisions we buy and and roast specialty coffee for uh sale across markets in the UK and Europe as well um we were voted.
The best specialty coffee rooster in Europe last year so origin became a b Corp three years ago now um which meant we had to create targets to reduce our our environmental impact and that entailed really digging into the resources that the company uses um and looking at the sort of linear economy approach um this is Guided by scientific.
Based targets um the greenhouse gas protocol and so on um and once we started to look at what resources we used and the circular economy had to be the uh it was the sort of remedy to a lot of these issues so we wanted to see how we could create um the the loops we have two maybe two different ma major types of waste um one is uh our.
Packaging waste cardboard um plastic it used to be biodegradable plastic and then the other one is uh organic waste from the roasting of the coffee um and then the um organic waste from our cafes as well so we are looking at methods of anerobic digestion composting using that waste hierarchy the created by the European.
Union to um navigate our way and kind of move the our waste up that hierarchy so we’re getting the most back out of it I think uh the greatest case of a challenge and learning from mistakes for the company has been our journey on deciding on the packaging for our coffee I think it was 2 years ago now we started using polylactic acid packaging.
So um Packaging made from sugar cane byproduct to make a bioplastic recently and just through um the industry learning more about that packaging we discovered that the land use and the land use change that entails um that comes with the growth of polylactic acid as a packaging means that it’s actually worse way worse than using recycled.
Packaging or postc consumer recycled packaging I had an excellent opportunity to be able to work with origin coffee I’ve been researching um the the borp movement and looking particularly at the borp certification process and looking at the role of borp certification um and that process and how that creates sustainable.
Organizations and so I’ve had the opportunity to interview then a number of their employees um and through a sematic analysis actually research and identify how how the certification process has helped create a really amazing sustainable business we wanted to work with the business school because we are constantly trying to learn how we.
Can build sustainability into the business better um and to learn how everybody’s roles and the company can better engrain sustainability in their practice you had to have conversations in different formats so not just talking to businesses through PowerPoints through slides through traditional presentations but having that.
Interactive conversation that two-way conversation to hear what they are working on right now and how we can work with them as an academic I think it’s very important to talk and um work with businesses in person uh to relate with them rather than only relate on secondary data um and we can do the through events or through the one to one.
Research that I mentioned
