What goes around, comes around
At the end of each shift, my colleagues and I clean-up the shop - wash dishes, stack up the chairs, sweep the floors and make sure to clean the Espresso machine. Sometimes coffee grounds can get stuck in the group head (where boiling water flush through the coffee grounds) and the steam wand has dry old milk on the outside (yuck!) No one likes the tastes of nasty old milk and burnt old coffee in their cup of coffee so any responsible barista would make sure the machine is ALWAYS clean.
What surprised me most was the amount of coffee waste we throw away at the end of the day. Some days we would have kilos of coffee waste that ends up in the bin. If you’re curious about how coffee waste can be used, here are some quick examples:
Use as compost - sprinkle some on top of soil before watering your plants. Coffee waste is rich in vitamins and nutrients which are very beneficial towards plant growth. DO NOT put coffee waste at the bottom of the soil where it touches the roots as coffee waste is acidic and will burn it (yes, we had someone do this before and it killed their plant)
Silky smooth skin - yep, you read that correctly. You can use coffee grounds as body and face scrub, getting rid of dirt and dead skin.
Make your home smell nice - put coffee ground in a bowl and leave it on your window sill, dinner table, in your room or bathroom (or anywhere else you can think of). If you’re a coffee lover, what is nicer than walking into a room smelling like coffee?
This got me thinking. What products out there use (or reuse) coffee grounds? What can you make from them apart from the things mentioned earlier? Sure there must be some sort of innovation that cleverly use coffee waste into something cool and new. That’s when I came across Kaffeeform, a company based in Berlin who uses coffee waste and bio-degradable materials to mould and manufacture coffee cups. For a year, I’ve been meaning to get myself one of their cups, but being in Vietnam at the time, cost of shipping and duty tax, it would’ve costed more than the product itself. Now, however, I’ve FINALLY got my hands on two sets - 190ml Cappucino cup and 290 Latte cup. I don’t intend to make this post a product review so I’ll go straight to the point. These cups areexactly what I expected -really sturdy, have a good weight (not heavy), comfortable to hold and, importantly, a great experience to sip a cup of coffee from! Plus, don’t they just look cool? Love the aesthetic shape and the natural colour of the cup. Like one full circle - from whole coffee bean, ground coffee, coffee waste and into a coffee cup.
