The Moscow Coffee Compost Project (MoCoPro)
A Cup of Coffee to Jumpstart Sustainability
By Becca Johnson
In the small college town of Moscow, a few intrepid undergrads saw a lot of good compost going to waste: coffee grounds. The unquestioned social addiction to have a cup of coffee to start the day channels a lot of biomass from productive tropical regions of the world to nearly every city, town, village, hamlet and hovel in the United States.
After the caffeine and acid is leached from these prized beans, they still contain most of their nutrients and resources, and are pre-ground for optimal composting. However, most coffee shops and diners send this nitrogen rich worm-bait to the landfill.
The Moscow Coffee Compost Project – known as MoCoPro – started as a student grant project through the University of Idaho Sustainability Center in 2008 and has grown to become a community institution.
“Students are itching for a purpose, and that itch is how MoCoPro got started,” Owen Baughman, MoCoPro director says. “Getting students involved in small, but purposeful, projects helps promote an attitude of campus volunteerism and, I hope, empowers students to identify problems and create solutions.”
Through University and community networking, MoCoPro has been using volunteer foot and pedal power to intercept, collect and compost several tons of coffee grounds for almost two years. They collect daily from five coffee sellers on the University of Idaho campus and several major community coffee shops, including One World Cafe, the Moscow Food Co-op and Botticelli’s. That's 44 collections per week from 10 shops.
Some 300-400 pounds of grounds generated each week are donated as compost to the Palouse-Clearwater Environmental Institute, the Soil Stewards organic garden, and numerous community members in Troy, Potlatch, Moscow and Pullman, Wash.
“Last fall, I posted a free compost add on Craigslist and quickly made some new friends who were very eager to haul away truckloads of it,” Baughman says. “In the ad, I said that the grounds were free, but also mentioned that we are volunteers, and the project is not currently funded.”
Though a cart used to transport the grounds was purchased through a grant, other items such as a bicycle, shovels, bike chain, bike locks, buckets and bins have been donated by the community recipients of the grounds.
“MoCoPro connects downtown businesses with backyard gardens. I hope that this one small example of such a connection inspires folks to develop many more creative ways to localize needs and solutions,” Baughman says. “For every pound of coffee grounds diverted from the landfill into a local compost, that's one less pound of peat moss or steer manure that needs to be shipped hundreds or thousands of miles to satisfy the same need.”
Project volunteers have also begun selling the grounds. At the end of the semester, they will invest the funds in a micro lending site through which they will lend money to sustainable entrepreneurs in countries that have been ecologically damaged by coffee production.
Thus, their efforts will go full circle, using what was once waste to enrich volunteerism in the community, enrich local gardens, and enrich the lives of people who may have been negatively affected by the coffee production that generated the waste.
This semester, they have been supplying a cooperative community/university/high school garden project with compost.
“I have definitely gained the satisfaction of making this happen; I've also earned some skills in coordinating volunteers and coordinating fairly complex schedules with many people involved,” Baughman says. “I think I can speak for all of the volunteers when I say we've all gotten a bit stronger from hauling all that worm bait around.”