What happens to coffee grounds and food waste in a cafe? | Discovery | Gardening Australia
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- Опубликовано: 6 фев 2022
- Sophie visits a community compost network in Semaphore where cafes and gardeners have organised a face to face, old school, super local, compost collection network that is closing the loop on food waste while building soils. Subscribe 🔔 ab.co/GA-subscribe
People the world over are interested in waste, compost and doing the right thing with food scraps. In one Adelaide suburb, a local grassroots compost network of scrap collectors has been very successful in diverting 120,000kg from landfill. The motto of the group is “A café’s waste is a composter’s gold!”
Stuart Cameron, café owner explained how the network benefits cafes who often have to pay handsomely for waste services, especially composting services. Stuart: “We tried to do composting previously but we were just too busy. Scraps would build up. It just didn’t work. We produce about 40kg food scraps and coffee grounds every day. We cook everything from scratch, so there’s lots of waste. There was a huge change when Tim started taking the scraps. He guaranteed to take all the scraps.” Stuart can show the kitchen area with its 5 separate bins for collection. He says his staff are very enthusiastic about separating the scraps. “If we can do this in a busy café with a small kitchen, any café can do it.”
The network meets regularly and 6 volunteers will stage a meeting for the cameras at the café. They are all gardeners and note that there isn’t a central place they take all the food scraps. Scraps at various shops and cafes are picked up by gardeners who simply take the scraps home or to their community garden. It’s not hard to imagine what they will talk about - Will my worms eat coffee grounds? Can I give meat scraps to chooks? Who’s picking up compost from Café X? It’s a compost citizen’s conversation group.
Why is the Semaphore network so successful?
Tim: “This is an old area, a bit like the Port of Fremantle in Perth. People have been here for generations. There are old houses with big gardens. There’s a strong community already. That helps. Plus being on the coast we have very sandy soil that is deficient in nutrients. And there are horse stables around here, so we want their manure!” Maybe all it takes is a bunch of desperate gardeners who know the value of organic matter. Or as Tim says “we’re building soil, building community and saving the planet!”
Tim’s tips to start your own compost network:
Tim: “We found that some cafes just stay on coffee grounds and they don’t grow into giving away food scraps, which he thinks is a pity, so he suggests having a sit down meeting with the café owner at the beginning and setting up an agreement. “Explain what you want to see happen on both sides.”
Tim: “I’ve seen a few people who think they can do this elsewhere, and sometimes it’s failed. It’s all about harnessing the assets in your community. And working out a system that suits everyone. What works in one place, won’t work somewhere else.” Learn what the rules are for café waste under your local council.
Tim: “Every day there is something positive thing you can do for the environment. It’s about taking control and do something positive and useful. It’s providing an additional relationship that is more than just being a customer. It acknowledges that we have a larger agreement. I’m not just sitting down for a coffee. Doing this makes feel better about myself and the world. We want a larger sense of Ok-ness before you have your coffee and that’s becoming more important to people.”
Next time you have a coffee, maybe you can start taking the coffee grounds home for your own garden. Or better still band together with your mates and start a waste revolution.
“We don’t want to grow our group. We don’t want too much publicity!” Tim explains that the group was originally called the Compost Network, but this resulted in so many queries from people all over the world, and raised too much attention, so they renamed to the Semaphore Compost Network. “It’s about place making. People are always asking me about compost, how to compost, but I’m not a compost expert. I send them to watch Costa’s videos.”
Filmed on Kaurna Country | Semaphore, SA
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Развлечения
"Adopt a cafe". That's a lovely spirit 😀
It really is!
I collect the coffee grounds, egg shells and greens from my local patisserie. One big bucket a week to build our compost.
Just ask your local, you'll be doing them a favour if you collect it regularly and you get great ingredients for your compost FREE :-)
The V&A uses their coffee grounds for growing mushrooms years ago. Glad Australia is catching up.
I want something like this in the south-east Melbourne!!!
very cool
Maybe I should start one in my area.
Go for it! Let us know how you go.
This is a totally brilliant initiative, and an exemplar of the power of bottom-up community organising
Absolutely! Thanks for watching and for the lovely feedback.
Love this idea, our family doesn't make as much green material as I expected so this would be a dream for me.
I love it
I totally agreed IT SHOULD BE MANDATORY ! Wonderful concept that needs to be applied. 👏
Wonderful idea !🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰
Degraves St cafes have a similar but much larger system in place and use a purpose built dehydration machine to speed up the process. Works a treat...
Could anyone tell me ,is there starch left in used coffee grounds?.....if so I'm going to try converting it to sugar with malted barley and distilling it .I usually collect it when I can to throw on garden
I go to 2 coffee shops who give it to me whenever I ask.
Coffee grounds make an excellent compost, and keep cats away from vegetable beds.
Does it really keep cats out of vegetable beds?
@@Midnorme I can't say it's a law of nature... but for me it worked. They do not like the smell and go to poop away!
@@Midnorme I'd love to know too
I didn't realise cats ate vegetables...
The network would be better if the cafe's cut out the home gardeners and used their scraps to create compost to grow their own food that is then sold in the cafe's. That's hyper local and beneficial for all of their customers who get to enjoy fresh picked food.
Reminds me of my friends comment about "why have a veggie garden when it's cheaper if I buy from Woolies!" My response is its not just about the money. But cafes are businesses and need an ROI for them to initiate.
@@dannyryan6411 There is no ROI from giving away food scrap for free, indeed there's a net productivity loss.
In contrast, growing food on site with compost from on site scraps creates an opportunity for price mark up and thus ROI.
This video can't prompt the "hyper local" nature of this scheme without cutting out the home gardeners becoming the obvious direction a scheme like this should go. There's plenty of restaurants and cafes who indeed do grow their own foods and in fact have higher prices as a result but gain a popularity bonus because of the extreme freshness of the food. There's rooftop gardens, hydroponics, aquaponics, aquaponics on a roof, aquaponics in a shipping container, a garden out back, a garden inside, and everything else inbetween.
At the best least the businesses should be charging the gardener's for the scraps of they're leaving money on the table.
It's just about scale. Your ideas are great and idealistic but reality is how many cafes can rent a shop with a garden or space for compost. If they can afford the rent, they'd need multiple locations to make it worthwhile
@@dannyryan6411 Entirely untrue. Firstly what you described isn't a scale problem, it's a space problem and such a problem would only exist if traditional rowed crop was the only way to produce, which many cafes have already demonstrated is not the case. Space requirements are actually very modest needing as little as 1m^2