Expectation
vs. reality making coffee lampshades
Over 1.5 million tonnes of coffee grounds are sent to
landfill around the world every year. In the UK and Ireland alone it’s over
600,000 tonnes or up to 93% of all the coffee waste produced.
A huge amount and an indication of just how popular this new
drug of choice has become.
Coffee shops are replacing the pub for people to hang out in
and it’s socially acceptable to have all night coffee houses and even drive by
coffee collection points.
These facts passed me by and as I don’t drink coffee.
This changed last week when I was looking online for new
lampshades to make ( I tend to make these when winter comes to keep my sanity
until I can get out in the garden again).
I’ve made shades out of various materials, concrete, paper,
old car parts, plumbing material, plastic, old spanners and even dog hair, so
when I saw a shade made from spent coffee grounds I thought “ I could do that”
I’m being proved
wrong.
The images of these super smooth, tough and durable shades
were the result of 5 years’ worth of tinkering
with materials and a special ‘patented secret formula’ so the designer said on
their website. How hard can it be? Just a few dollops of PVA soaked grounds put
into a cone shape and were away. Wait a week and then hang up the resulting
shade.
It’s a case of expectation versus reality here. I have not a
collection of cup and plate shaped shades (I use the term lightly) that bear no
resemblance to the original images. I was also told in the blurb on the website
that the shades “emit a delightful smell of freshly ground coffee when the bulb
heats the shade” erm, no they don’t. I’ve been sneezing every time I walk past
them and the rest of the family thing that there’s a pile of old grounds in the
kitchen compost bin rotting away and keep asking what the horrible pong is. The compost bin is probably where they belong…
but is it?
There are a lot of potential uses for spent grounds and the
more ways to recycle the waste, the less the large coffee chains have to pay
for getting rid of their by product.
Some uses found so
far are:
- Add to the compost
- Used to dye paper and cloth.
- Mix with glue and touch up furniture.
- Flea repellent.
- Odour eliminator.
- Soak up grease.
- Covert to laundry detergent.
- Make into bioplastic.
- Use as a biofuel. Oil is extracted from the waste, grounds are dried to filter impurities in biofuel production, and any remnants are burnt as a source of energy from electricity.
- Firelogs.
It’s the composting of the grounds that I am concentrating
on now as I haven’t the patience to “tinker” for 5 years to get the mix right
for lampshades.
I have decided to do a test bed with the coffee I collected
from the shops last week. I got over 5kg from about 10 shops who all happily dropped
their used grounds into my open bin bag. There are some large companies who
have bags of grounds on the counter for us gardeners to collect but I didn’t
come across any. One shop chain spokesperson said they have now stopped giving
away the grounds all together to the public after an email was sent to all of
the outlets, I’m not sure why, probably people were trying to boil up an extra
brew in their kitchens.
I’m not very hopeful the grounds will improve my garden. Tests have been done before and the results
have not been particularly successful, only in one case of growing oyster
mushrooms did the grower actually say there was an improvement in their crop.
It could be a case of old wives tales and hearing of the benefits often enough
in press releases from the coffee shops could actually make us believe the
hype. In most cases large amounts of grounds added to the garden slows plant
growth and actually kills plants.
Coffee grounds are a rich source of caffeine, richer than
coffee itself, depending on the brewing technique. One of the key functions of
caffeine in the plants that produce it is ‘allelopathy’ ,the ability to reduce
competition from surrounding species by suppressing their growth. Caffeine is
packed into coffee seeds for the very function of suppressing the germination
of other seeds.
Studies suggest it also stalls root growth in young plants,
preventing their uptake of water and nutrients. Yet others have shown it has
antibacterial effects (so much for boosting soil bacteria). It’s not really
acidic either so throwing it around your rhododendrons won’t really do much.
I’ll probably start by just adding the coffee to the compost
bin and let the worms work on it,. Even this gets mixed reviews. Some
vermicomposters (worm growers) say the spent ground don’t hold water so are not
very palatable. I’ll mix mine in with other wetter food scraps as big clumps of
coffee might heat up too much.
Just in case you were wondering if dry coffee grounds deter
slugs and snails – They don’t! I’ve had
the bag outside and it’s full of them.
The ‘Old Wives’ have been at it again.
