Eco-friendly coffee giant Single O has joined forces with coffee recycler Reground to collect spent coffee grounds from seven Melbourne cafes and repurpose them to beautify community and home gardens, as well as Melbourne Zoo’s landscaping.
Well-known Melbourne coffee haunts Morning Market, Three Blue Ducks, Occident, WoodsYard, Tokyo Lamington, Sonny Ray, Est 1983, and Arthur St Deli are among the cafes signed up to have their grounds recycled.
Single-use coffee cups are Australia’s second-most littered item (behind plastic water bottles), but the coffee grounds required to make just one latte is equivalent to two kilometres of driving in an ICE vehicle in terms of its carbon footprint.
That’s because coffee grounds release methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas that is considered 30 times stronger than carbon dioxide — some 75,000 tonnes of grounds have ended up in landfill, off-gassing the chemical compound.
Reground partner cafes are provided with a bin for used coffee grounds and chaff (the bean’s husk), which will be collected on a frequency determined by use and need, with all end-point data provided so cafe owners can see the grounds in action.
The grounds are used in compost and worm farms as well as mushroom growing operations and even building materials all provided free of charge to community gardens and home gardeners within approximately 30 km of headquarters in Alphington, Victoria.
Reground was founded by a former Brunswick barista named Ninna Larsen in 2015, who says she was also motivated to recycle the amount of needless coffee ground waste pouring out of the country’s bustling cafes each day.
Initially Larsen started wheeling the cafe’s coffee grounds down to community garden CERES to be integrated into fertilizer, but when other cafes came knocking for her to do the same for them, she realised she was onto a good thing.
Reground hit a high note when it was contracted by Lavazza to reuse the coffee grounds at the Australian Open in 2020, where an estimated 200,000 cuppas were enjoyed by the swelteringly hot crowds prior to the onset of the pandemic.
Larsen tells SmartCompany she hopes the partnership with industry heavyweight Single O will start a wider conversation in the industry and beyond about a circular economy, “from farm to cup and back into the soil”, she says.
“We believe that the best-practice roaster model that Single O is pioneering with Reground should become the new standard.
“We see it as the responsibility of coffee roasters to ensure a sustainable end-point for their products, and we’d love to work with more roasters and cafes who are ready to step up.”
Larsen’s startup was a natural partnership for Single O, which was founded in 2003 by Emma and Dion Cohen as a trailblazing coffee purveyor sourcing socially and environmentally-sound beans, products, and produce.
Single O general manager Michael Brabant tells SmartCompany the team is thrilled to be working alongside Reground: “We’re excited about Melbourne because the passion for circularity is really evident, and Reground is the real deal,” he says.
To date, Single O say they have diverted 8,220 kg of coffee grounds into homes and community gardens throughout Victoria, as well as to the grounds of Melbourne Zoo — amounting to 15,618 kg of emissions avoided.
In the decades since its launch, Single O has established itself as one of Australia’s most successful coffee suppliers, with an estimated one in every four hospitality venues featured in last year’s Good Food Guide grinding Single O beans, according to the Cohens.
The savvy duo also pioneered a milk-to-tap technology known as The Juggler for cafes. The tap system has so far saved upwards of 18 million plastic milk bottles from heading to landfill, and reduces operating waste onsite for cafes by about 80%, the pair say.
Emma Elsworthy is Climate Editor at Crikey, SmartCompany, and The Mandarin, and writes daily morning newsletter the Worm. Before joining Crikey in 2021, Emma was a breaking news reporter in ABC’s Sydney newsroom, a journalist at BBC Australia, and a journalist in Fairfax Media’s regional network. She was part of a team awarded a Walkley for coverage of the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfire crisis, and won the Australian Press Council prize in 2013.
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