The scheme will focus on independent cafes, restaurants, as well as retail chains, hotels and visitor attractions. Countrystyle Recycling has provided participants with 40-litre caddies to store the spent grounds before they’re collected every week.
The used coffee grounds are then taken to Countrystyle’s sister company, Envar, in Cambridgeshire, where they are processed and turned into coffee pellets. Launching next year, the horticultural pellets will be available in garden centres and sold to horticulturalists.
Currently a large proportion of the coffee grounds produced by the leisure and hospitality industry are collected in their general waste and go to landfill, with a portion collected as food waste for composting or taken to anaerobic digestion plants.
For each tonne of coffee that is collected and turned into coffee fertiliser pellets the carbon saving is reportedly 580kgs of CO2 compared to sending it to landfill. That is the equivalent to driving 1,400 miles in a typical family car.
‘Tremendous response’
Martin Heathcote, chief executive officer of Countrystyle Recycling, said: “Improving environmental sustainability and providing innovative waste management solutions is at the heart of everything we do for our customers, whether they are big or small.
“The response to our coffee recycling scheme from the hotel, leisure and hospitality sector has been tremendous and we look forward to rolling out the service across Kent over the next few months.
“We can do more to protect our environment when it comes to recycling and repurposing materials, and this coffee ground project is a perfect example. If you enjoy a coffee at one of the cafes working with Countrystyle, you are diverting coffee grounds from landfill.
“We’ve developed a system which processes the coffee grounds into pellets to be used by gardeners and horticulturalists as they provide essential nutrients for plant growth. The plan is that the pellets will be available through garden centres early next year.”
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