a decent conversation with Steampunk.

What started off as a wee vintage coffee campervan, is now an iconic cafe of North Berwick in Scotland. Founder Cath, talks to us about Steampunk’s incredible sustainability efforts, composting with Caledonian Horticulture, and what other small businesses can do to make a difference. 

Can you please tell us a bit about Steampunk Coffee and what inspired you to start? 

I founded Steampunk in 2012, when we began roasting coffee in my garage and serving it at events from my vintage campervan called Mavis. Steampunk quickly outgrew this setup and we moved into an old warehouse in the centre of North Berwick, where we continue to roast and serve our coffees to this day. We source ethically and transparently, and roast seasonal single origin specialty coffee. We roast all our coffees on site and serve three different options on our bar, alongside home baked treats. We also sell tins of coffee to take home, alongside brewing equipment and merchandise. 

The inspiration to start the business was of course a love of great coffee but also the desire to make it more inclusive and accessible to all. Because we are based in a small town, we’re both reliant on local support, but also able to pay back into the local economy with jobs, skills training and opportunities for symbiotic partnerships. I love the opportunity that coffee gives me to offer a valuable space to our community; to work with other indie businesses, and to showcase how business can be used as a way of inspiring different sustainable and community based approaches. This can be done whilst still remaining focused on roasting excellent coffee. We have done this over the years by letting our space be used for community gatherings, by offering space to other businesses from food pop-ups to the record store run upstairs, and by running our own initiatives like our composting project.


You work with Caledonian Horticulture for your compostable packaging, how did you begin this relationship with them and how does the composting with them work? 

Our relationship with Caledonian Horticulture is a great example of what I was saying above. It has come about through personal connection enabled by the small community in which we operate. I was desperately trying to find a way of composting our disposable cup waste and was sharing our difficulties surrounding this when Tommy Dale, their founder, reached out and offered to trial composting the cups and lids in their windrows where they compost garden waste. We gave them a few bags of cups and once they discovered that they composted well on their site they invited us to drop off the waste with them for processing. So now we try to recover as much as we can from customers and I drop them off at their composting site 2 miles up the road once a month.

We are also their customers, buying logs from them for our woodburning stoves in the winter. I buy compost from them for my own garden too and I love that it contains our coffee cup waste!

What advice would you give to small hospitality businesses that want to dispose of their compostable waste correctly, but don’t yet have the infrastructure to do so?

I would recommend that people reach out - both through community networks but also online - and ask what options may be available in their local area. If you are outside the large metropolitan areas it can be hard to find ready made solutions, instead you may need to use your connections to create them. This can arguably have a much greater effect as I think the real solutions for the big problems facing our planet will be achieved through this sort of grassroots organising.


What’s your favourite thing about working with decent packaging? 

I love your cups! We have recently had our own branded cups designed by Rachel Seago (the talented illustrator who has worked with us since we started) and we think they are super cute. We love knowing that once they are used they can be diverted from landfill and tuned into beneficial compost instead. 

How else do you reduce waste at Steampunk?

We have always held sustainability at the heart of how we operate. If you visit us you will see that we repurpose and reuse everything we can - it gives us our distinct and very personal aesthetic and it really is a core part of who we are. You can see it in our vintage furnishings; when we have built and rebuilt our bar we have reused the materials; and our menu of baked goods is designed to avoid food waste. We minimise other waste by, for example, not offering bottled water and being part of the nationwide Refill Scheme. Our coffee comes packaged in hardwearing tins and we offer discounted refills for those also. 

We have tried to spread word about the cup composting over the years and even take in one of our wholesale partners cups to compost for them. Unfortunately the composting has not spread as much as we would like despite our efforts. I’m hopeful this will change as we work alongside Caledonian Horticulture at Fringe By the Sea, where they make a mammoth effort to divert waste from landfill. I feel confident that working together we can spread the word much more widely and I commend the festival organisers for their focus on sustainability and giving such a great platform on which to set a great example of sustainable practices..


How have your customers responded to your composting efforts with Caledonian Horticulture?

Our customers are good about returning the cups for composting when they visit our cafe but of course there is always an ongoing need to share information about how and why the composting system works. Although we have shared about the project on social media and in our newsletter, it can be a bit hit and miss about whether people hear about it. That is why we have been very pleased to take part in a collaboration with Caledonian Horticulture and decent packaging this summer to make a short documentary about the composting project we share. As a small indie business, time is a scarce resource so we are grateful to Caledonian Horticulture for making the film and to decent for taking part also. We hope this film can inspire others to start similar projects. (Watch this space!)

Do you have anything in the pipeline for Steampunk? 

We have been around for 12 years but it feels like the business is only now in a place where we can focus on sharing a bit more about the way we approach things. The past decade has been one of incredibly hard work, long hours and lots and lots of problem solving. I guess looking back we have done some things differently to the standard way businesses approach things and having a bit of time and space to begin sharing that more widely is really rewarding. I strongly believe that lots of people making small changes is much more valuable than just a few making large ones. I hope that our story empowers people to realise that change begins with you and me and even a seemingly small step in the direction of sustainability can ripple out and have a surprisingly wider impact.

Find Steampunk on Instagram here.
Learn more about Caledonian Horticulture and composting here.