What to do with spent coffee grounds?
Spent coffee grounds have numerous uses, from spreading on the compost heap to making coffee cups.
The ideal use for spent coffee grounds is to use as compost, add to the garden.
A handful of coffee shops place the spent grounds outside to be picked up, more should follow this practice.
3fe use in their garden behind the coffee shop. What they do not use, Littlecress take away use for growing cress, 3fe buy the cress.
Mixed with wood chippings used to grow oyster mushrooms. Small Batch has kits to grow oyster mushrooms. Each mushroom kit contains coffee from 100 espressos. What is left over can be used in the compost heap or spread on the garden.
Small Batch supply their coffee grounds to the Espresso Mushroom Company, a mushroom grower, who in turn, supply Small Batch with mushroom growing kits.
The coffee grounds can be used in cakes, instead of ground coffee.
Can be used in soap.
The coffee grounds can be used for making jewellery, even furniture.
Rosalie McMillan has created the Java Collection, a range of jewellery that uses recycled silver, gold and diamonds combined with material derived from coffee grounds.
Green Cup turn coffee grounds into furniture.
Even used to make excellent coffee cups.
Kaffeeform turn coffee grounds into beautiful designed coffee cups, each one unique.
The cups are unusual as both reusable and recyclable. One cup and saucer are made from the grounds of six cups of espresso, plus natural resins, waxes, oils, cellulose, biopolymers and wood fibre. The cups include biopolymers. The walls of all plant cells are made of biopolymers, long chain molecules with properties allowing them to be plastically formed, and thereby eliminate use of crude oil based plastics.
In the natural world there is no concept of waste in time or space. Walk in ancient woodland, there is not growing piles of waste, not unless Man has been dumping waste. The output of one process is the input to another.
We should aim to close the cycle, to emulate these natural cycles, the output of one process the input to another, what we once saw as waste, the raw material for another process.
When next in a coffee shop, please ask what they do with their spent coffee grounds? At the very least, make available to take away for the garden.
