Our Climate Action Plan
Climate action can’t wait. A livable future depends on ALL of us—businesses, individuals, and policymakers—to make bold choices that prioritize the health of our planet.
Here’s Numi’s 5-step plan to fight the climate crisis:
Measure and Label
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. To get a full picture of our climate impact, Numi conducted a complete greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory from farm to warehouse. Then we translated that data into a Carbon Footprint Label for each of our products, broken out by emissions category: Ingredients, Packaging, Transport, and Preparation. Being transparent about our emissions means you can make a more informed choice about the products you consume, and holds us accountable for future reductions.
Reduce Emissions
As a Climate Neutral Certified business, we’re on a journey to reduce emissions throughout our supply chain. That means we measure, reduce, and offset 100% of our annual Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. Using our farm-to-warehouse GHG inventory, we prioritize areas that yield the greatest reductions, from helping producers transition to renewable energy, to reducing corrugate in our shipping. The tea estates we work with draw carbon from the atmosphere on a net basis, using regenerative practices like no-till farming, cover cropping, perennial planting, and agroforestry.
Offset Responsibly
For the last 10 years, Numi has worked with CarbonFund to offset 10,191 metric tonnes of CO2e from our business operations. We only offset what we can’t reduce, and we choose high-quality credits sourced from critically threatened ecosystems. Since 2018, we’ve purchased credits from Envira Amazonia in Brazil. The conservation project, which has protected nearly 500,000 acres of tropical rainforest, supports a transition in land ownership to local communities and establishes alternatives to cattle ranching, such as the collection of medicinal plants and açaí.
Use Plant-Based Packaging
We created Numi’s compostable* plant-based tea wrappers to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and open up pathways to a plastic-free future. Made from renewable non-GMO sugarcane, our wrappers displace 14.3 metric tonnes of petroleum-based virgin plastic per year and produce 67% lower greenhouse gas emissions than conventional wrappers.1 They perform better across all impact categories throughout their lifecycle, from energy resource use to pollution to ozone.
Advocate for Change
We fight for meaningful policy that prioritizes environmental justice and invests at the scale of the climate crisis. In partnership with the Climate Collaborative, Numi established a climate advocacy program to engage with policy makers on key legislative priorities priorities. Bills we’ve supported include the Advanced Clean Trucking Rule, California SB 525 (offshore wind), the Build Back Better Act, and other proposals to accelerate the shift to a post-fossil fuel economy.
Why Tea Is Part of a Climate Conscious Diet
For almost 5,000 years, farmers have grown tea trees in harmony with nature, using regenerative methods that enhance biodiversity, preserve wildland, and store carbon in the soil. When done right, organic tea cultivation is a system of perfect ecological balance. Numi is proud to support this lineage by sourcing directly from growers who steward traditional tea farming knowledge.
These regenerative tea growing practices make for a cup that’s less carbon-intensive than other drinks, like coffee. The carbon footprint of a cup of Numi tea is 86% lower than a cup of conventional espresso, and 37% lower than a cup of sustainably produced espresso.2
Add in sustainable choices like organic certification, plant-based packaging, and Climate Neutral certification, and you’ve got a cup that’s good for you and good for the planet.
Why Organic Tea?
Plant-Based Wrappers
Our Carbon Footprint
References:
*ASTM D6868 compliant, compostable in industrial facilities
1Stanford Graduate Student project, LCA for Complex Systems
2Comparison of average carbon footprint of Numi tea (.038kg CO2e) to conventional espresso (.28kg CO2e) and sustainably produced espresso (.06kg CO2e); figures cited from: Nab, C, Maslin, M. Life cycle assessment synthesis of the carbon footprint of Arabica coffee. Geo: Geography and Environment. 2020; 7:e96. https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.96
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