It’s one of our favourite habits, but those who enjoy a daily cup of coffee may not be aware of its very significant downside. Each year billions of non-biodegradable coffee cups, lids and disposable pods pile up in landfill, creating a growing environmental issue.
Australians use an estimated one billion disposable coffee cups annually, but these cups are not recyclable in most states. Moreover, Australians spent more than 215 million dollars on coffee pods in 2015, but the convenient capsules are not biodegradable because of the combination of plastics and aluminium with organic matter inside.
And so a growing number of social entrepreneurs are getting creative to raise awareness and inspire coffee lovers to reduce the impact they have on our planet. Others are channelling the funds consumers pay for their daily roast towards a range of social projects.
Melbourne-based social entrepreneur Soula Thuring has taken the direct approach, selling biodegradable coffee cups with an additional Enviro-Grow Kit which turns the used cup into a plant. Thuring says she came up with the idea for her kits when she learned just how many takeaway cups in Australia are wasted every year.
Also, recently Melbourne-based coffee startup Pod & Parcel began to put its coffee in biodegradable coffee pods to be used in Nespresso machines.
However, cups and pods aren’t the only problems associated with coffee consumption. The many tonnes of used coffee grounds also have an impact. When organic waste breaks down in an anaerobic environment such as a landfill site, it releases methane – a far more harmful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
In 2015, friends Ryan Creed and Julian Mitchell set out to solve this problem by founding Western Australia’s first urban mushroom farm in Fremantle, using waste coffee grounds to grow gourmet oyster mushrooms. Their company Life Cykel has since diverted more than 10 tonnes of coffee waste from landfill and grown more than 1,600kg of mushrooms.
Life Cykel is now building partnerships with a range of organisations such as Virgin Airlines, which supplies the coffee grounds from its airport business lounge and New Zealand’s Abilities Group, which provides meaningful work to people with disabilities.
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Source: The Guardian, 8 May 2017