The Green Connection between Coffee and Mushrooms
You wake up in the morning, make your cup of coffee, and throw out the coffee grounds when you are done – but wait! Your used coffee grounds are actually fertile soil for growing gourmet Oyster mushrooms. GroCycle, a British social enterprise has built a thriving urban mushroom farm in the heart of the city of Exeter by selling their coffee-grown mushrooms to some of the top restaurant and food outlets in the South West of England. Just to give you an idea, in the UK alone, over 80 million cups of coffee are consumed, making for an exorbitant amount of coffee ground waste that ends up in local landfills.
GroCycle wants others to get in on the coffee-derived mushroom action by offering home GroCycle Mushroom kits. The self-contained cardboard box produces tasty fungi that only require water to thrive.
Across the pond in the United States, the coffee ground mushroom is in full effect with the company Back to the Roots, which also sells and promotes the tasty compost-grown combination with their own organic mushroom farm kits.
So the next time you make coffee, consider mushrooms, and jump in on the coffee ground mushroom bandwagon that is creating sustainable solutions for repurposing waste. While you’re at it, get to know these 7 initiatives that are also using coffee as a tasty vehicle for good.
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