by Eileen Vincent, Member
PSWR’s Church in Society Committee
First Christian Church of Orange, my congregation, is a Green Chalice Church. We have continued to work on projects that help our church members be greener individually and as a unit. Here are some of the things we have done, and you may wish to use some of them, too.
· We continue to have 2 little reminders of green life habits in our weekly newsletter.
· We put in solar panels for electricity, which also freed up some funds to continue to work on other church projects.
· We have explored using reusable tablecloths, compostable cups, utensils, and plates.
· We are proud to use products from Equal Exchange*. It gives us a little smile to know that children are not being used to pick the coffee beans, and the businesses are small, often female managed. We sell chocolates, olive oil, and coffee once a month; the proceeds go to our youth groups.
Coffee has been our recent challenge. In the dark ages, we started with 2 huge percolating pots and found we were wasting lots of coffee at the end of events, someone had to arrive an hour early to start the coffee, and the pots had a measuring rod that was never able to be cleaned. Yuck!
Next, someone gave us a Keurig coffee pot; we bought another one to make service faster (not ‘THE SERVICE’). We regretted the K cups that were not green appropriate and, even with 2 pots, we didn’t get our coffee fast enough, often with regret that we had lots of choices including hot chocolate, but they were always out of the one you wanted. Also, each cup was expensive.
We thought we had it corrected with a BUNN coffee pot. However, it had an electrical cord that was not supposed to be removed. Even with many signs, “Don’t unplug the coffee pot,” it was actually unplugged and therefore damaged.
Persistence is the name of the game. Now we got a new BUNN coffee pot that brews 12 cups into an air port. There is no plug-in; we hardwired it into the electricity and filtered water sources. It has an economy mode. NOW, we can use our special bulk, Equal Exchange coffee. Success!
Come have a cup of coffee, brown in color but green in composition.
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