Our Commitment to Sustainability
Drink Me! Tea Room is committed to sustainability efforts in our tea room and in our community. Since opening, it has been a mission of ours to always find ways to help our environment and the people that visit us. We are committed to being a positive force for the future of our planet through environmental sustainability, social responsibility and waste reduction. We are excited to announce that we have recently been awarded status as a Certified Green Business in Arizona by Local First Arizona. Also through our efforts, we were awarded Sustainable Business of the year for 2022 by the City of Tempe.
The mission of Drink Me! Tea Room is to provide a sustainable business that has less impact on the environment. Being an organic plant-based establishment, we reduce our environmental footprint, energy consumption and waste. We maintain policies and practices for the efficient use of energy, water and natural resource consumption. The policy has been developed by Owner Melissa Harlan as a fundamental basis for how we do business.
We focus our efforts on:
Use of recycled products and products with low environmental impact
Provide to-go compostable food containers
Keeping waste to a minimum, sorting, and separating recyclable materials from general waste
Composting to reduce food and paper waste
Using sustainable materials
Conserve energy and energy efficiency
Choosing local and organic products
Listen to our new podcast about our sustainability efforts.
We are proud to be an Arizona
Certified Green Business!
We were recently presented with our Green Business Certification from the Tempe City Council and Local First Arizona. We were recognized for our outstanding efforts incorporating sustainability practices into our operations with a commitment to reduce waste, conserve energy and water, prevent pollution, and protect Arizona’s natural resources.
We have undergone a rigorous sustainability audit and created a sustainability pledge document with all the ways we are committed to creating a sustainable environment at our tea room. Being an organic & plant based establishment, we reduce our carbon footprint, energy consumption, and waste. We maintain policies and practices for the efficient use of energy, water and natural resource consumption.
When you visit us, you are helping to continue this pledge to create a sustainable movement!
Sustainable Earth's 2022: Small Business Award Winner
We are so honored to be interviewed and featured as one of Sustainable Earth’s Small Business Award winners for 2022 and featured in their article (excerpt below) and podcast.
Drink Me! Tea Room | Making Sustainability Scrumptious
From the very start she wanted the business to be a reflection of herself, which is why the tea room is gluten-free, organic, and plant based. Melissa eats a gluten-free vegan diet and found it frustrating when restaurants only served one or the other with very limited options. She said that the tea room is a place where customers don’t need to ask a million questions about what is in the food. As a plant-based tea room, sustainability is already baked into their business model through avoiding the greenhouse gas emissions, chemical inputs, biodiversity loss, and animal abuse associated with animal-products and factory farming. But their initiatives to lessen their environmental impact don’t stop there. Recycling, composting, minimizing waste, conserving energy and purchasing local, organic, or plastic-free products are all efforts that Drink Me! Tea Room focuses on.
To read the rest of the article head to Sustainable Earth’s Website
Listen to the podcast interview here at The Green Scene.