Coffee Retailers Find Ways To Cope With Daily Grind Oregon Shops Team Up With City Waste Haulers To Turn Grounds To Compost

Every morning, frazzled commuters clutch cups of coffee like warm little security blankets. They guzzle gallons of coffee, cup after cup, day after day.

And the residue of those coffee cravings? More than 8 million pounds of coffee grounds every day in the United States.

That is one estimate of how much we produce, based on figures from the National Coffee Association of the USA. Closer to home, in Oregon and Washington alone, we churn out an estimated 271,000 pounds a day.

In most cases, those pounds of grounds end up in landfills.

“Generally, anything that goes into a landfill doesn’t degrade,” said Bob Barrows, a solid waste reduction analyst with the Department of Environmental Quality.

Which means that even though grounds, like most other plant-based waste, decompose fairly quickly in a compost pile, in the landfill the powdery waste is just one more thing to take up space.

In the Portland area, one Lake Oswego waste hauler and four coffee retailers have organized to keep their tailings out of the landfill loop, and Metro, the regional land-use planning council, is experimenting with ways to compost coffee grounds and other food waste.

“Finding someone who would make a buck processing” coffee grounds into compost “isn’t the problem,” said John Foseid, compost projects coordinator with Metro. “The problem is finding someone to haul it.” Most waste haulers don’t pick up yard waste in commercial districts, he said, only in residential areas.

That’s what makes Lake Oswego unique, says Kirby Ness, manager of Rossman Sanitary Services, the city’s waste hauler. Residential areas back up against business districts, so yard debris trucks don’t have to go much out of their way to pick up stores’ coffee grounds.

Rossman made a deal with four local coffee shops to pick up their grounds on the company’s residential yard waste pickup route. He estimates his company gathers more than 3,200 pounds of coffee grounds from the stores each week. The grounds then are sent to a local composting company.

“I’ve found that very few vendors can take (coffee grounds) because they don’t take compostable materials,” said Mark Masterson, manager of the Lake Oswego Starbucks. “At any other store we wouldn’t have been able to do that.”

The coffee shops have saved money on garbage collection because yard waste costs less to pick up than regular garbage, he said. Masterson, who also serves as environmental coordinator for Starbucks’ western Washington and Oregon operations, said several other Starbucks stores offer grounds free to customers, and have arrangements with individual nurseries or composters to pick up their used grounds, but nothing on a large scale.

Other coffee merchants say they, too, have been stymied by lack of a system for mass disposal of the grounds other than tossing them in the garbage.

“We don’t have any way currently of disposing of our grounds in all of our stores,” said Stanley Selland of Coffee People. “We have done one-on-one deals with individuals, but nothing chain-wide.”

Though some other parts of the country compost food waste such as coffee grounds on a large scale, Oregon now has no organized system in place, Foseid says.

Metro is conducting two yearlong pilot projects for composting pre-consumer food waste, such as vegetables and flowers from grocery stores. Later in the year, the projects might expand to include post-consumer waste, like plate scrapings.

“We are at the very beginning stage of composting,” Foseid said.

“Less than five years from now, all of this will be commonplace.”