We drink approximately six billion cups of coffee every year in Australia. Recently, there’s been a push to reduce the amount of disposable coffee cups going into landfill, but what about the spent grounds?

Planet Ark estimates only seven per cent of spent coffee grounds are going to worm farms and gardens while a whopping 93 per cent end up in landfill.

They’ve been working to change the linear journey of coffee beans from espresso machine to bin, to a circular system where spent coffee beans can live on to fight another day.

Spent coffee grounds are nutrient rich and still useful post coffee machine, particularly because the high temperature they pass through sterilises the grounds.

One company recognising the opportunity to reuse spent grounds is Life Cykel, which collects spent grounds from cafes and uses them to grow gourmet mushrooms.

Life Cykel mixes spent coffee grounds with mushroom spores. The mushrooms eat the coffee grounds, we eat the mushrooms and the leftover substrate is sent to gardens in the form of compost. Win, win, win, win. Life Cykel has farms in Noosa, Melbourne, Fremantle and Margaret River.

Check them out or go to Planet Ark’s site and register your interest if you’d like to do something useful with your bakery’s spent grounds.