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NUTRITION-RICH SOIL: Eric Jong is co-founder of GroCycle, a non-profit that has been growing Oyster mushrooms from waste coffee grounds since 2011.
“I think there are tons of possibilities. I believe it could be added into all sorts of things as a component, rather than the main flavor pillar you’d build a product around,” Hoffmann says. “I think it could make great ice cream or sorbet, great kombucha or kefir, great cocktails or soda.” The diverse potentials of coffee waste point to one crucial consideration: we need to think differently about it, not as waste, but as potential. “Waste is simply resources in the wrong place,” says Daniel Crockett, head of communications at UK-based Bio-Bean. Bio-Bean works on the consumer side of the coffee supply chain, and is the first company to industrialize the process of recycling waste coffee grounds into biofuels. “Bio-Bean is a pioneer in the circular economy, turning waste into resources and the challenges of urbanization into great opportunities,” says Crockett. That’s a larger business trend that Crockett sees taking place, in coffee and other industries. “Increasingly, businesses recognize the impact of adopting circular economy thinking, not just on the environment but on their bottom line,” he says.
Converting coffee grounds to biofuels on an industrial scale has led Bio-Bean to develop a wide array of partnerships—from airports to train stations, to hospitals—all looking to use biofuels within their businesses. They also provide services to companies within the coffee industry, collecting used coffee grounds from cafés. Sometimes it even comes full circle, like with 918 Coffee Co., which provides spent coffee grounds to BioBean and in turn, fuels their roaster with the resulting Bio-Bean fuel. Not only can grounds be used for fuel, they also have applications in construction, as shown through research by Australian engineer Arul Arulrajah, who has been researching the potential of using coffee grounds to pave roads. One project used a combination of 70 percent dried coffee grounds and 30 percent slag (a waste product from steel manufacturing); the mixture was bound together with a liquid alkaline solution, then compressed into cylindrical blocks. The resulting material was tested and proven to be strong enough to be used as a road substrate, as documented in Arul-
rajah’s study, published this year in Construction and Building Materials. When composted, coffee becomes an incredible organic resource high in phosphorous, potassium, magnesium, and nitrogen, the last of which is an important nutrient for plants. The rich nutrition supplied by compos-
Waste
is simply resources in the wrong place. ted coffee has led to initiatives like Ground to Ground in Austin, Texas, and Melbourne’s Reground. Both projects work to source used coffee grounds from cafés and compost them. This recovery process saves the coffee grounds from landfills. Besides being used in compost, coffee grounds can also be used to directly grow food, namely mushrooms. Eric
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