Putting Signage to Work for Zero-Waste Messaging

Cat & Cow in Randwick, Australia.

Looking for a concise way to tell customers about your sustainability goals and how you put them into practice? A handful of thoughtfully placed, well-designed signs may do the job.

Posters, boards, and other carefully planned visual cues—photos shared on social media that show your café using reusable service ware, for instance—can communicate a low- or zero-waste approach in seconds, and at times with more impact than a long written mission statement.

Rātā Café

Wellington, New Zealand

Rātā Café sits inside New Zealand’s Zealandia ecosanctuary, and its proceeds help fund the Karori Sanctuary Trust, the organization that manages the preserve.

Reflecting the café’s environmental aims, Rātā composts food scraps, coffee grounds, and paper napkins, and its takeaway packaging is biodegradable.

Hoping to get more customers to bring their own reusable cups and mugs, the café hired a professional sign artist to create a blackboard montage carrying a short but forceful message: Choose to Reuse.

The Choose to Reuse sign and menu at Rātā Café in Wellington, New Zealand.

Alicia Bogdanowicz, the café’s manager, says the goal was maximum clarity. “We wanted to make our message as clear as possible,” she says. “Previous to that, we just had a member of staff doing our boards. By bringing in a professional, the message is clear and concise and comes through via the images and colors.”

After the sign went up at the front desk and was shared on social media, Bogdanowicz says it “created quite a stir” and drew messages through sustainability networks. “We’ve been receiving messages [about it] through sustainability networks, and it’s been awesome.”

The response has been positive enough that Bogdanowicz intends to commission the same designer for a Mission Statement board at the café’s main entrance.

That board, she says, will follow a similar approach but frame the message around Zealandia’s sustainability work. “It’s going to be something similar, but in the context of Zealandia sustainability,” she says.

Cat & Cow

Randwick, Australia

Director Lenka Kriz opened Cat & Cow in the Sydney suburbs in August. Before launch, she deliberately placed signs describing the shop’s sustainability mission and zero-waste approach on the café windows and posted actively on social media, so that arriving customers would already know the café does not provide single-use takeout cups.

Kriz says social media posts began two months ahead of opening. “We started posting to social media two months before we opened, to really enforce our approach and to invite the neighborhood to donate their unwanted mugs,” she says. “When we opened, almost every person either had their drink here or brought their own cup.”

The team (above) and window sign at Cat & Cow

For customers who arrive without preparation, the café’s posters lay out the choices quickly: drink in, purchase a reusable cup, or borrow one. Kriz says the signs were made with a friend who works as a professional marketer, and the aim was to boil the café’s approach down to simple, accessible messages.

As Kriz sees it, unexplained changes can looklike needless inconvenience. “Unless you share the proper message, people wonder, ‘Why would you do something that’s less convenient?’” she says. “She helped me craft signs that are visibly appealing and make sense so that even if we don’t have time to speak to every customer individually in the queue, they understand what we’re doing and why.”

Kind Café

Vancouver, Canada

Kind Café, a vegan café and coffee shop in Vancouver, also opened in August with a no-waste model that encourages customers to eat in or bring their own containers. Customers who forget their takeout containers can choose from a collection of donated, previously used plastic takeout boxes, along with mugs and mason jars. These can be returned later or kept; the café charges a 50-cent deposit only on mason jars.

Kind Café’s BYOC sign

Owner Samantha Emerman spread the word with bold BYOC (Bring Your Own Container) signs on eye-catching pink cardstock placed around the café and shared on its social media channels. Matching signs promote donations of reusable ware and encourage customers to use cloth napkins.

Use a cloth at Kind Café

Emerman says the café offers no paper napkins or other single-use items at all. “We don’t have paper napkins or any single-use items at all at the café,” she says. “The visual poster over the cloth napkins explains that we’re trying to bring a ‘kinder’ café experience to Vancouver. It’s been amazing and very well received.”