Starbucks’s Grounds For Your Garden Program

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, by 2010 worldwide coffee drinkers will drink almost 7 million tonnes of it every year. This means a heck of a lot of spent grounds to dispose of somewhere. Rather than throw the nitrogen-rich material (and acid-rich!) - coffee grounds have a carbon-nitrogen (C-N) ratio of 20-1 - into landfills, global chain Starbucks has found a greener solution by giving it away to consumers with gardens.

Starbucks’s Grounds for Your Garden program actually began as a grassroots initiative back in 1995. After growing steadily for almost a decade, it was officially launched in 2003, offering up free spent coffee grounds to North American customers year-round on a first come, first serve basis. Grounds are packaged in reused coffee bags and sealed with simple directions for using them in the garden or compost pile, where they can help improve soil quality.

“Coffee grounds are a valuable source of nutrition for the garden,” explains Ben Packard, director of environmental affairs for Starbucks. “Reusing coffee grounds in the garden is a great alternative to disposing this rich resource from our stores. It’s a win for gardeners and a win for Starbucks.”

[Via: Springwise]

Fairtrade Fortnight

Fairtrade Fortnight starts on 25th Feb and lasts until the 9th March this year. One company, Cafédirect, is launching a new rich full-bodied coffee from the very best Costa Rican coffee beans, called Special Selection Costa Rica - a premium, 100% Fairtrade, instant coffee.

I’m, not a coffee drinker, but chances are a lot of you are. Apparently Special Selection is a new seasonal line in instant coffee that follows the different coffee harvests around the world, capturing the beans at their prime. Once Special Selection coffee beans are picked, “they are carefully hand selected by Cafédirect’s growers to create a coffee that is both unique in character and taste”.

Cafédirect is a company we’ve mentioned many times, firstly I used to work by their offices, but more importantly they pay fair prices for its crops, so you can rest assured that while you enjoy your cuppa, you also contribute to improving the quality of life for growers in developing countries. In addition Cafédirect reinvests its profits into tailor-made training and development programmes, working directly with its growers to develop their expertise.

You can pick up a 100g jar of Special Selection Costa Rica from Oxfam stores in the UK, for around £3.25.