At first whiff, providing coffee consumers with ready-made compost material does seem innovative and creative, serving the needs of both consumers whose composters need a boost, and the environment, keeping all that waste out of the landfIll. STARBUCKS OFFERS ITS GROUNDS FOR COMPOST
By Karen Gram, The Vancouver sun, JULY/2003
Has Starbucks gone as green as its raw beans? The coffee giant is offering its customers "complimentary spent coffee grounds" (coffee waste) to give backyard gardens and compost bins a good caffeine kick. As a marketing ploy, it's audacious. Starbucks consumers will remove a portion of the coffee waste from their outlets for free and Starbucks will be praised for its environmental consciousness.
"This is a fantastic opportunity for significant waste reduction for the company," says Ben Packard, Starbucks director of Environmental Affairs in an interview from Seattle. "It's absolutely fabulous as far as minimizing our footprint and engaging our customers in the process."
You're not kidding, it's fabulous, says Vancouver marketing expert Lindsay Meredith. "These guys come out looking lily white. They are covering a multitude of issues and doing it for no cost."
At first whiff, providing coffee consumers with ready-made compost material does seem innovative and creative, serving the needs of both consumers whose composters need a boost, and the environment, keeping all that waste out of the landfIll.
But as Susie Silverside of the GVRD composting department points out, "I don't know anyone who is ever looking to take home more waste." Coffee grounds, in the right amounts and used correctly, make decent compost material. They act as a green material (the juicy material that decomposes on its own) in composting with a carbon-nitrogen ratio of 20-1, according to the master gardener program at Washington State University. After brewing, coffee grounds contain two per cent nitrogen, not quite as rich as grass, but not bad. But it must be mixed with the brown compost material to work. "If you have a lot of yard scraps I think adding coffee works to speed up the process," says Silverside. But dumping vast amounts of coffee Into your backyard compost bin is not a good idea. You need to mix them with drier brown organic material like leaves to create a more porous mixture.
"If you just throw them in without mixing with something else, you will get a vinegary smell," says Silverside, adding straight grounds can be used as a mulch on acid-loving plants like hydrangea, azaleas and blueberries. Coffee grounds also work well in worm composters but again, you can't add too much at a time. Coffee drinkers make enough coffee waste at home without going begging for more.
The biggest winner in this deal is Starbucks, says Meredith, a professor at Simon Fraser University, as a marketing strategy, it's pretty astute. If a student of mine came in with this, I'd say he got what I've been saying. I'd put it in the A category."
Waste removal, including collection and dumping or tipping fees is one of the largest costs to retailers, says Meredith. And having done the market research that shows Starbucks customers enjoy gardening and are environmentally concerned, and realizing that coffee is good compost material, "Bingo, the green light goes on. Then they get the media interested which isn't hard because environmentalism . plays well in the media, 'Oh look at that, free advertising."' It doesn't matter if the customer really doesn't need the extra coffee grounds, he says.
Coffee grounds make up about 20 per cent of Starbucks garbage by volume and 40 per cent by weight. Packard wouldn't say what the actual volume is for "competitive reasons."
In the Lower Mainland, Starbucks already composts its coffee waste for a fee at Fraser Richmond Soil and Fibre, an industrial composting facility that produces 165 tonnes of soil and mulch annually. Starbucks pays a tipping fee of about $65 says manager Steve Aujla, (he wouldn't say how much exactly, again for "competitive reasons.")
Packard agrees the company has hit on a win/win/win situation, though it didn't happen quite as Meredith imagines.
He says the company has a green team of store managers from around the continent who meet annually in Seattle. Several years ago, they reported that they had "some crazy people - also known as gardening fiends -who came in asking for their coffee waste. They'd leave a bucket at the outlet and pick It up when it was full. . After realizing that this was happening in several places, the green team decided to formalize the program. Now anyone can pick up used grounds neatly packaged in the five kilo siIver bags that the beans originally come in. "It's seems funny, but what we have found is that gardeners who know how to use it are really interested in this program," says Packard.
But not everyone agrees. Derek Messelink, coordinator of the University of BC Farm says that he likes the idea of closing the one-way nutrient route that exists with coffee from extraction to consumer to landfill, so that it comes back to the land. But if Starbucks really wanted to make a dIfference it could establish a facility that could take large quantities of urban waste and return the compost to community gardens and urban farms. "This idea could be pushed a lot further."