Fungi Futures

Enterprise

The scale of coffee waste just thrown into bins and sent to landfill in this country is astounding. In 2009, it was estimated there to be 4,158 ‘branded’ coffee shops in the UK (source: Allegra Strategies).  These, being amongst the largest high street cafes, will on average produce at least 70kg of waste coffee grounds per week. This equates to approximately 300 tonnes of spent coffee grounds produced every week across the UK – comparable to the weight of 21 double-decker London buses; every single week of the year! These estimates don’t even take into account the spent grounds produced by the other 6000 smaller ‘unbranded’ UK coffee shops.

So what happens to all this coffee waste once we’ve enjoyed our espressos? Usually the coffee puck is tapped into a drawer beneath the coffee machine and this then gets emptied into the rubbish bin every couple of hours when full. As there are few dedicated organic waste collections for businesses, the vast majority of these tonnes of spent grounds are just bagged up with the mixed waste and sent to landfill. Over 15,000 tonnes a year of it!

As with most environmental injustices, something only gets done about it when there is an economic incentive to do so. Here at Fungi Futures we believe we have come up with just the enterprise to recycle coffee waste – turn it into high value and delicious Gourmet Mushrooms!

We have already been inundated by requests from people to help them set up enterprises growing mushrooms from waste. Over the next couple of years we will be working on a blueprint model with the aim of developing a system that could be replicated in other cities across the UK.

We are currently looking at funding options to help realise the potential of this idea, but at the moment are not in the position to give advice and guidance to everyone that gets in touch. Please don’t email to ask for specific enterprise information at this time, as we simply don’t have the manpower or resources to give you a good reply. Our aim is to first get a great blueprint together, so we don’t all have to make the same mistakes!

In the meantime, the best way for anyone with an interest to learn more is to come and attend one of our ‘Mushrooms From Waste’ courses where we will cover the practical techniques of producing mushrooms from waste coffee grounds and begin to look at how it could be implemented in your local area or situation.

We are, of course, open to any approaches from funders or existing organisations that wish to hire our expertise to complement any work you may already be involved with, or can aid us in creating our vision.