They need your help to build what will be Australia’s first urban mushroom farm.
Collecting coffee ground waste from Fremantle coffee shops, Life Cykel’s mushrooms will be sold to local restaurants, food outlets, markets and their online
store.
Oyster mushrooms are a sought after delicacy with incredible flavor. Believe it or not, they don’t taste like coffee!
The City of Fremantle has jumped on board, already committing $15000 to the project. Now Life Cykel
is calling on more like-minded people who believe local food, local economies and a greener future is what we should strive for.
Mayor Brad Pettitt with Julian and Ryan celebrate what the mushroom farm can bring to the city
While we all love our delicious cup of morning coffee, this boom in society’s love for coffee has led to an unseen problem, around 300 tons of coffee ground waste per year in Fremantle alone is sent to landfill. It is estimated globally this number is around
2 billion tons of coffee by-product being produced every year. Our solution is as valid to the prominent coffee culture of Fremantle as it is to any other city. Current practice sees coffee ground being mixed with other rubbish and taken to landfill. The
anaerobic environment in which it is placed allows it to become a greenhouse gas in the form of methane. This waste of a valuable resource is needlessly adding to the waste disposal problems of our city and of our culture in general.
The coffee cherry has been grown abroad, dried, milled, packed and shipped all the way to Fremantle. Given 1% of the coffee bean ends up in your coffee cup, this is a dramatic underutilization of energy. The remaining 99% of coffee ground currently ends
up as a problematic waste product. Few people are aware of the size of this issue. We estimate there are some 200 coffee houses in the larger Fremantle area, with an average coffee ground production of 30kg per week. Six tons of used coffee beans go to landfill
each week from the Fremantle area alone this figure reaches a remarkable 300 tons per year. The City of Perth numbers are in the thousands of tons of coffee ground waste per year going to
landfill!
Life Cykel is a social enterprise that will better utilize this current waste product by taking the coffee ground from the coffee shops and using it to grow gourmet organic mushrooms locally in Fremantle, creating Australia’s First
Urban Mushroom Farm. To do this we will take the coffee ground from 70 odd coffee shops within the Fremantle CBD and grow organic mushrooms locally at a currently unused commercial space in Fremantle. The mushrooms will then be sold to local
restaurants, food outlets and at the Fremantle markets. Once the Mushrooms have fruited and been picked we will then use the mushroom infested coffee grindings as a soil amendment for local gardeners.
Come along on the journey and learn how Life Cykel’s environmentally friendly and sustainable four step process can have mushrooms ready to eat in just weeks, starting from the collection of coffee waste using their purpose built bicycle.
