One coffee, two coffees, three coffees…. Coffee is surely the most consumed product in companies! If, on top of that, we store the ground coffee in aluminium capsules, we understand that this is a real obstacle for a company that wants to reduce its environmental impact. Let’s stop throwing away our coffee!
At Cleanfox, we didn’t shy away from this hurdle and took it head on! Through this article, I want to share with you the steps we took to stop throwing away our coffee (and aluminum). We hope that you will follow our example and that you will make your company more responsible.
Coffee transition: How did we do it?
To start, we stopped buying capsules and bought a machine that uses coffee beans. But we didn’t throw away the old machine! It is used from time to time in a meeting room.
We have therefore set up a process to revalue our coffee grounds. First of all, by launching a mushroom culture! The idea is simple: we use our coffee grounds, cardboard and wood (tray/crate) to create a growing medium. Then we add mycelium, let it incubate for 2 weeks in the dark, then comes the fruiting phase. Despite two attempts, we still haven’t managed to get any mushrooms but we don’t despair and hope to be able to taste our zero waste mushrooms soon!
With 20 Foxes, we produce a lot of pomace, so we had to find an alternative way to grow mushrooms. Indeed, Edouard, our CEO, did not really consider the option of turning us into an urban farm! When our coffee grounds are not used to grow mushrooms, they are composted in a building compost in the 2nd district. I found this compost on the website http://www.compostaparis.fr/ .
So I bought a plastic bin at Leroy Merlin and contacted the Foxes asking them to empty the coffee grounds into this larger bin. Each week the bin is emptied into the building compost. If we start a crop, the bin does not need to be emptied into the compost. I sincerely encourage you to do the same in your business! In addition to creating cohesion within the team around a project (the cultivation of mushrooms), you will make your colleagues aware of the revalorisation of waste!
