Two billion coffee pucks end up in Aussie landfill each year. One Melbourne outfit, Reground, has been chipping away at that by collecting grounds from cafes and upcycling them in gardens. Now we’re bringing Reground to Sydney for faster change. Every Sydney café can get on board this soon to be large scale dedicated grounds upcycling project. It all launches this week under ‘Giving A Puck.’
We love our numbers in coffee. Grams in, flow rates and so on. These numbers though? They’re pucked…
30% of Single O’s scope 3 emissions are from spent coffee grounds.
That’s what our 2019 sustainability report showed us.
Turns out the puck from your morning latte or long black is a climate-warming bomb when it hits landfill, releasing methane, a gas that’s 30 x more harmful than Co2.
This led us to think about what sort of problem this was, not just for us and our café partner community, but beyond Single O.
Side by side, annual spent coffee puck waste would circumnavigate Australia twice.
Gets you thinking twice alright. Aussies are discarding around 2 billion pucks each year, enough to circle the coast of this here behemoth island two times over. They weigh in at 75 million kilos, or 1.4 times the weight of the Harbour Bridge.
Awesome that coffee is embraced as our favourite beverage.
Just pucken madness from a waste perspective!
Up to 70% of a café’s food waste is coffee grounds.
That’s despite all those avocado skins from our love of avo on toast. Coffee grounds are a major ‘food’ waste item, especially in cafes, flying under the radar.
Well, thankfully, not everybody’s radar…
The barista who got busy with bins and created Reground.
Reground started in East Brunswick, 2014, off the back of then-barista, Ninna Larsen, wanting to stop organic waste from going to landfill. (A mindset more commonplace from her native home, Denmark.)
Ninna got busy separating out the café’s bins, then other café’s bins, and so on. These days, Ninna heads up Reground, which collects and upcycles coffee grounds from hundreds of Melbourne cafes, into community and home gardens, championing a circular economy. Legends!
Collaborating with good people on a mission.
Reground was everything in Melbourne we needed in Sydney, and as luck would have it, they were willing and able to come tackle grounds in NSW, with their 10 years experience, systems, data management, you name it. The right people at the right time, giving something a go!
Single stream goodness for Sydney, in more ways than one.
Grounds will be collected from cafes and delivered free of charge to local community and home gardeners, replenishing soil with coffee’s nutrients, boosting resilience, and more. This is a triple win, with grounds diverted from landfill and avoiding methane, grounds imparting nutrients in soil, and all in a hyper-local manner to boot.
Find your closest cafe that supports Reground here.
Great coffee-making includes great coffee disposal.
When coffee is your everything, to take ‘ownership’ of its journey beyond the shot makes perfect sense, from a holistic craft perspective, and true quality mindset. We’re excited to know that Sydney cafes and baristas can now trace their coffee from source, right through to disposal.
