The responsible Lehmus Roastery becomes a Greenreality partner and recieves the Climate Partner label

Lehmus Roastery is a small roastery in Lappeenranta that has been roasting coffee in an old storehouse building on the shore of Lake Saimaa since 2016. All of the roastery’s coffees are made responsibly and offer special flavours for customers to enjoy.

Lehmus Roastery is participating in the climate work of South Karelia by joining the region-wide Greenreality partnership network coordinated by the City of Lappeenranta. Greenreality partners already include many brick-and-mortar companies in the region, each committed to a more environmentally friendly business in their own way.

However, when a company commits to even more ambitious climate work, such as emissions monitoring, calculation and targets, the company is awarded the Climate Partner label. The city is granting this label to Lehmus Roastery, says Environmental Director Ilkka Räsänen.

In recognition of Lehmus Roastery’s ambitious climate work, we have awarded them the Climate Partner label as the first company to receive this honour.

The roastery’s ambitious climate targets also require measures to compensate emissions

Lehmus Roastery primarily aims to reduce emissions from production, and emissions that are difficult to reduce are offset. The roastery’s carbon footprint is monitored annually. This is done to identify the areas with the best emission reduction potential and to select genuinely effective measures to reduce emissions.

According to Arttu Muukkonen, CEO of Lehmus Roastery Oy, taking responsibility into account is the only sensible way for a modern company to operate.

We demand it not only of ourselves, but also of our partners, customers and the world around us in which we operate. Companies’ actions are very significant in terms of the environment, so it is smart to do your best.

In Muukkonen’s opinion, it is great and progressive of the City of Lappeenranta to provide information and thus support companies in climate work with its own example and other resources.

It is important to us that we can be in contact with climate coordinators at a low threshold and receive up-to-date information and assistance whenever needed. This means that cooperation comes with many benefits: the city provides a supportive platform from which local companies can reach the national leading edge.

As a Greenreality partner, Lehmus Roastery commits to further improving the efficiency of gas consumption in its operations, acquiring restorable peatland, and further enhancing its packaging solutions.

The roastery will start acquiring restorable peatland, which will be planted with willow and various plants that can be used in the food industry. A drained peat field can emit 20 to 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year into the air. Carbon dioxide emissions can be controlled very effectively by restoring such land and developing it into a carbon-binding bog.

The roastery also plans to find out whether solar cells could be built on the premises of its partners’ coffee production areas. This would enable better utilisation of solar power generation potential compared with the potential of domestic solar power.

Concrete goals have already been achieved

According to Muukkonen, Lehmus Roastery offsets its carbon footprint in accordance with international standards and the goal is to eventually offset all emissions from the roastery.

We currently offset the emissions from the roastery’s own operations and energy consumption. We aim to reduce the purchased energy emissions of the roastery, and later the café, to zero.

Lehmus Roastery has been a computationally carbon-neutral operator in terms of emissions from the roastery’s energy use since 2020. The roastery offsets emissions from in-house operations by acquiring carbon sequestration exceeding the emissions with a soil improver made from the by-products of domestic industry.

Lehmus Roastery has developed and improved the efficiency of its gas consumption over the years with, for example, a new and more efficient roaster. Thanks to development work and the increase in roasting volumes in general, gas consumption per kilogram of coffee to be roasted has decreased by as much as 75% from 2018 to 2021. In tea packaging, the roastery switched to lighter, pre-printed boxes in the autumn of 2021. As a result of the change, the amount of cardboard needed for tea packaging has been reduced by 58%.