The madding Crowd

- Swag Bag -

From take away cups to coffee pods, the coffee industry is rife with single use plastics and packaging. Thankfully there are some great alternatives available for us to stem the environmental impact of these mounting plastic problems. Less thankfully, the most obvious problems are frequently overlooked. In the case of the coffee industry we have had no functional alternative to the unrecyclable, foil-lined coffee bags used to package the 49,000,000 kilograms of coffee beans sold in Australia every year.

Roasted coffee, unfortunately, needs to be carefully insulated against oxygen and sunlight in order to stay fresh and delicious, making these environmentally unfriendly packages a necessary evil for as long as we’ve obsessed over its freshness. Whilst there are many compostable alternatives appearing on the market, most of these biodegradable plastics are either not disposed of properly (causing methane emissions worse for the environment than CO2) or are only compostable in an industrial facility where temperatures of up to 65 degrees are used. Equally, we know that poorly crafted solutions to single-use packaging can be just as environmentally irresponsible as the single use products themselves, so Madding Crowd has endeavoured to produce a simple, lifelong solution to the transport and storage of roasted coffee.

These Swag-bags are handmade by Hide and Seeker, a sustainable craftsman working out of Newcastle with locally sourced materials. Produced from a material typically used in the construction of heavy-weather sailcloth and high-end adventure equipment, our Swag-bags are hand-stitched from a single piece of advanced fabric called X-Pac. We know it sounds like overkill to pack coffee in the same stuff that carries ice-axes to the summit of Mt Everest, but after trialling prototypes with countless fabrics and bag constructions, no other material came even close to preserving the integrity of roasted coffee like X-Pac. Its composite fabric comprises multiple layers that not only ensure low exposure to oxygen, humidity and UV, but will last a lifetime of rigorous coffee drinking. The seam stitching also allows the carbon dioxide released by fresh coffee to escape the bag without letting in additional oxygen, much like the valve on a conventional coffee bag.

These are the same bags used to supply our cafe partners, who individually keep an average of 2000 coffee bags out of landfill every year.

Get them here… click