An espresso machine is a lovely little waste factory: every silky flat white leaves behind a puck of wet grounds. Ours produce about forty kilograms of them a week. None of it goes to landfill, and here is where it all ends up.
The garden loop
Half goes into the compost collective three doors down, where it heats the winter heap beautifully — coffee grounds are nitrogen-rich and worms are apparently as fond of caffeine as the rest of Fitzroy. The finished compost comes back to the street’s planter boxes, which is why our footpath tomatoes are frankly showing off.
The take-home crates
By the door you’ll find the grounds crate: free bags for anyone gardening, making body scrub, deterring snails, or dyeing fabric that lovely earthy brown. On Saturdays it’s usually empty by ten, which makes us happier than most of our sales figures.
What’s next
We’re trialling oyster mushroom growing on grounds with a crew from Collingwood — early results are delicious and mildly unsettling in scale. If the trial holds, expect a mushroom toastie whose entire supply chain travelled about 900 metres. Watch this space, and bring a bag for the crate.