Woman from Penarth finds ingenious uses for leftover coffee grounds destined for landfill

A woman has found a number of creative ways of upcycling used coffee grounds that are destined for landfill.

When Dr Rosie Oretti from Penarth retired from the NHS she began volunteering in a coffee shop and realised how much of the grounds were wasted.

Coffee grounds that end up in landfill can omit potent greenhouse gases, including methane, which is around thirty times more potent than carbon dioxide.

During lockdown, Rosie decided to set up a company called "Grounds for Good" where she began reusing old coffee grounds for beauty products.

She also started to make created candles, chocolate, body scrubs, vodka, gin, fire lighters and much much more from the wasted products. 

"I  just want to show be able to showcase to people what you can do with a waste product", she said.

Rosie has since gone a step further and installed a skip in Cardiff city centre and for £20 a month, local coffee shops can dump their waste grounds there.  

She then transports the skip to a plant in Hengoed where an anaerobic digester transforms the spent coffee into electricity that is fed back into the Welsh grid. 

Jennifer Price who runs the Bryn Power AD Plant said the coffee goes through a process to be turned into electricty.

"An Anaerobic Digester is simply a very big stomach, so you put food waste into it and you get gas and fertiliser out of it.  So coffee gets turned into electricity."

• How much energy does coffee waste produce?

It takes around 4.5kg of coffee waste to create one kilowatt of energy.

That is enough to run a shower for six minutes, power a laptop for 20 hours or use an oven for 30 minutes.

On average, a coffee shop goes through 150kg a week of wasted grounds a week.

Pugh's Garden Centre is one of the many businesses that is involved in the scheme.

Matthew Rodger said, "We produce over a hundred kilograms of coffee waste on a weekly basis so by utilising the recyclable scheme from Rosie, we can ensure our coffee grind doesn't go into landfill. 

"Our customers are impressed are a responsible retailer and doing the right thing for the environment."

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