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Starbucks Protects Environment by Offering Grounds for Your Garden
Starbucks Coffee developed "Grounds for Your Garden," an initiative to reuse coffee grounds, the largest portion of its waste. It's a year-round program that offers complimentary bags of spent coffee grounds to customers, parks, schools and nurseries for composting. The waste reduction has become a popular way for North American gardeners to enrich their soil. Coffee grounds act as a green material with a carbon-nitrogen (C-N) ratio of 20-1. The grounds are packaged in recycled bags and made available on a first-come, first-served basis to customers.
The program was started nine years ago by a team of store employees who were inspired by the numerous requests for the store's organic waste. Coffee grounds make up the heaviest portion of the waste in Starbucks stores making the "Grounds for Your Garden" program a significant waste-reduction effort.
Starbucks also conducts several other environmental initiatives that make a difference, including a reduction in the size of paper napkins and the thickness of plastic store garbage bags to eliminate more than 1.8 million pounds of solid waste in 2004.
Complimentary coffee grounds can be picked up at your neighborhood Starbucks, or ask your local store manager for more information.
Tips for Composting Coffee Grounds:
- Mix grounds with soil around acid-loving plants and watch them flourish.
- Add brown leaves and grass clippings to mulch to help balance the pH of the soil.
- Mix grounds into compost to accelerate the composting process.
- Grounds should not be more than 25 percent of any compost pile. To counteract the acidity of coffee grounds, add one teaspoon of lime or wood for each five pounds of coffee grounds in your compost.
- Help a worm bin flourish by feeding worms with coffee grounds combined with brown materials.
