Roisin Markham

I was trying to figure out how to bring the circular economy to our town, how to begin a conversation about it with like minds, local businesses and community groups.

I had attended Circularity 20. My attention was drawn to an award winning zero waste cafe in New Zealand with amazing community outreach, engaged local programs and growing food in the cafe.

Our local town Gorey has a lot of cafes and all the petrol stations offer takeaway coffee. I had been looking at the idea of spent coffee waste and circular economy social enterprise. There are several people looking at this in Dublin and I am sure in other parts of Ireland also. One is Andrew at the Urban Farm, his Urban Oyster Project is an excellent one, I’ve been following his journey with hydroponics since 2016.

The idea is not a new one but I could see Gorey having a good closed looped system around coffee waste. It could build connections between different local communities and create value through circularity, creating a circular economy idea that can be used to talk about the idea, harvest from it and explore other opportunities. Seeding the concept through action.

The idea is to take spent coffee beans collected from commercial premises in Gorey, removing them from the current waste cycle. The spent coffee beans are used to grow mushrooms. After the mushrooms have grown the spent coffee beans makes great garden compost. Both the mushrooms and the garden compost products can be sold or perhaps exchanged for labour.

I like the idea that cafes in the town join a club and that this group works together to bring about changes in useful rubbish, for their businesses & industry as a collective rather then as competitors. I wonder will that work?

I also like the idea of bringing a closed loop re-useable cup system into Gorey town. We have a large influx of seasonal residents that I think would support this system. Obviously this would need to be adapted during COVID. If the group was cohesive it could bring significant changes to reducing the waste in the town. I think this would say a lot about the town and marking it as distinct in terms of its cafes, environmental concerns and willingness to push for change.

Social enterprise, community jobs, volunteering opportunities would be created. All of these approaches require a circular designed, generative project approach. We need to start with a pilot project.

Exploring other useful waste, closed loop ideas could go from there. For me the first step is to open this conversation within the town, talk about circularity and share the spent coffee bean project as an example.

Perhaps my ideas feed into other ideas on food hubs, food waste and food security, food education, how to grow food, what to eat?

Feedback Organic Recovery is a great example of joined up thinking in NSW Australia.

a business that collects food waste from cafes, restaurants and any other business that create it and manually convert it into compost! We add it to the farms to grow from, we teach anyone keen to get involved how to do it themselves and we provide it back to the community through the cafes we collect from and the 1hr farmers that join us every week at our plots. It’s pretty cool.
More and more today we see products developed as a result of higher consumer expectations for products that consider the environment. Feedback wants to increase consumer awareness about the importance of managing food waste now and into the future.

Feedback Organic Recovery

But how to start that conversation?

I’ve begun a Food systems padlet for collection and knowledge share on these ideas. Let me know if you’d like to grow that knowledge with me. Leave me a comment or reach out to me, @creativedynamix on Instagram or Twitter.

I’m really interested in redesigning our food systems and have ideas on how we might begin that process.