Central uses café coffee grounds for composting

PELLA — Central College students often start their day at Central’s Café@Geisler, ordering an organic coffee and then heading to class. What most students don’t realize is how their cup of joe contributes to Central’s recent initiative toward sustainability and charity.

For six weeks this fall at 4 p.m., students from Jim Zaffiro’s Global Sustainability class collected coffee grounds from the cafe and distributed them into composting tumblers at Central’s organic garden. The garden, an organic heirloom variety garden, generates produce that is donated to the Pella Food Shelf.

Ted Dirkx (pictured above), a junior environmental studies major from Alleman, is part of a student group trying to give back to the community.  

“I’m finding waste streams at Central that are useful to the community, and using students to compost the coffee grounds is teaching them different aspects of sustainability,” said Dirkx.  

Dirkx constructed the tumblers by using posts from old telephone poles and plastic barrels from Vermeer Corporation, which were going to be thrown out. All the materials on the tumblers, minus the hardware, are reused.

This kind of composting is much quicker than regular composting, which could take up to four to six months before it’s ready to be placed in the garden. Dirkx uses coffee grounds with a mix of fruit and sawdust in the tumblers.

For now, the project is just a test run. Students are hoping to create opportunity for an initiative to go 100 percent compostable one day. The students not only helped provided a way for the college to give to the community but also diverted waste from landfills. Landfills, which omit green house gasses, are a leading contributor to global warming.