Mr. Coffee Meet Mr. Mushroom

Apparently these guys have been getting a lot of press ever since they started their company, but it's a refreshing and heartening story. They've managed to create a whole business out of trash as they say.

'The two speak in terms of value, the value in things that otherwise go to waste. In Back To The Roots’ warehouse, even the racks where they store their mushroom kits come from somebody else’s waste. Diverting all that has built the business. Says Arora with the pride of a true scavenger, “Our whole company is literally built on trash.” '

Basically, they get paid to take used coffee grounds away from cafes, use the coffee grounds to grow mushrooms which they then sell to high-end supermarkets or to make DIY mushroom growing kits they sell to bored or green-thumbed homeowners, and then make the now twice-used coffee grounds into a high quality fertilizer mixed with fungus roots. They're expecting $5 million in sales this coming year, just a few years into the business.

That's what I call a pretty decent idea - although it's not a new one. Industrial eco-systems have been explored and used all over the world. This is just a rather innovative urban one, based on our changing middle-class trends of proliferating cafes, eating local, and eating gourmet. At it's heart though, it's moving from "managing" waste to thinking about waste as "resources." If only more people could do this.

As one of the founders says: “This whole country revolves around use and just throwing things away,” Arora adds. “Everything’s just one-time use. That’s not going to last. It’s not sustainable.”

He's both wrong and he's right. It's not just "this whole country" (America) that revolves around a disposable culture... it's essentially the whole world now. And it is most certainly not sustainable.

Read a full article about Back to the Roots here.