Canterbury Cafe recycles coffee grounds

A Kent recycling company introduces a scheme to repurpose used coffee.  Finn Macdiarmid reports.

Transcript

00:00The UK uses a lot of coffee, and Canterbury is no exception. With a dense population and

00:06plenty of cafes, hotels and restaurants, the city is the testing ground for a new coffee

00:11recycling scheme.

00:13Unlike driving your car, littering or using up electricity, drinking coffee might have

00:18a bigger environmental impact than you might think.

00:21The UK actually generates 250,000 tonnes of coffee grounds a year, and one Kent recycling

00:28company is trying to tell people this is a bigger issue than they think.

00:32Country Style, a waste management company, have launched a weekly collection for coffee

00:37grounds at Cafe 35 in Canterbury, with hopes of expanding across Kent.

00:41We're already collecting across every which area of Kent, so it wouldn't be too difficult

00:48for us, but we wanted to focus on Canterbury. It's got a hugely dense population of cafes,

00:55hotels, there's a lot of coffee grounds, waste produced here. So here, folks, in places

01:02like that, we want to get the density, so start here and we'll definitely push out

01:06as long as we can get the customers to get behind us and to try and recycle more of the

01:12coffee.

01:13The scheme sees the grounds emptied into a 40 litre caddy, where the waste is taken to

01:17a site in Cambridgeshire.

01:20At the end of the recycling process, the grounds become an organic pellet that Country

01:25Style hope to sell next year to gardeners and horticulturalists as a fertiliser.

01:30The businesses themselves, however, are the ones who have to pay for it, so I asked the

01:35owner of Cafe 35 if this might have a financial impact.

01:39I think you need to weigh it out because obviously the businesses that are putting the coffee

01:43grounds into their general waste, there is a cost against the waste, so by not putting

01:50it into the general waste any more, that's actually going to reduce those costs. So if

01:53anything, it may be no more expensive to do, it may actually be even cheaper.

01:58Country Style say they wanted to make the service cheap so that it would be easier for

02:02businesses like Cafe 35 to adopt it, but did say that some businesses could pay more for

02:08that sustainability.

02:09Well, with summer ending, we could see more and more people visiting their local cafes

02:13for a coffee.

02:15Finn McDermid for KMTV in Canterbury.