To make sustainable living a no-compromise way of life, plant-based personal care brand, The Switch Fix joined hands with Blue Tokai coffee roasters and Greenr Café to unveil two new initiatives promoting a zero-waste lifestyle. “Globally, 23 million tonnes of coffee goes to waste every year.
Climate change is making our coffee vulnerable, and to mitigate its impact, we must work towards creating a circular economy; the kind of economy that makes the most of the limited resources we have. As part of the ‘Coffee Beans a Lot To Us’ initiative, we have partnered with Blue Tokai to repurpose their coffee excess and create personal care products that are safe for us as well as the planet,” says Co-founder Abhishek Kumar.
Two body scrubs derived from this coffee waste — Clean Bean for oily skin and Daily Grind for dry skin, with shampoo bars in the pipeline. Co-founder Rhea Shukla says, “All our products are about clean and conscious living, but these coffee scrubs are the first from our repurposed ingredient range.”
The brand is known for its plastic-free packaging and cruelty- free agenda, and water-saving products such as bamboo toothbrushes, shampoo bars with ingredients like hemp seed oil, activated charcoal, blue tea, along with a range of deep conditioners, and hair oils. “We collect their excess coffee, sundry it and blend it with plant-based oils and butter to create exfoliation products,” adds Shukla.
A Greenr World
Another initiative undertaken by the duo is ‘Making the World Greenr’ to bust the misconceptions around vegan food and lifestyle. Kumar says, “Greenr Café offers a plant-based menu. So, we reached out to them with an idea of creating an art gallery creating awareness about plantbased ingredients, and they immediately fell in love with the idea.” This art installation of 12 different artworks is on display at Greenr Café, 32nd Milestone, Gurugram, till January 31.
“Every artwork shows a vegan ingredient done in different art styles to accentuate the vibrancy of vegan living. There are ingredients, like acai berry, that we both use, albeit in very different ways,” says Shukla, a visual artist, who has created most of these art pieces. The brand sources its raw material from partners who directly source from farmers in the villages of Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Karnataka and more. About the future plans for these initiatives, Kumar says, “We are working on expanding our haircare range with more safe, sustainable and effective shampoo bars.
And some additions to our skincare range. We plan on increasing partnerships with local farmers and communities to ensure lower carbon footprint, while increasing the fulfillment speed.” Shukla adds, “We love to keep working with like-minded people and brands to support the ecosystem of sustainable and conscious living.”