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.

Move over CFLs?

Elisabeth Rosenthal and Felicity Barringer write about the coming of LED lighting in the New York Times. I first heard about commercial applications of LED lighting when doing research for my thesis project on green hotels - some of the hotels I talked to were experimenting with LED lighting. While I've know about LED flashlights and camp lights for a long time, their super bright white light seemed ill-suited to room lighting to me. So it's interesting to know that people are really pushing this technology now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/science/earth/30degrees.html?em

Of course, for good reason though. LED lights are much more energy efficient and material efficient than CFL lights - our current standard for greenness. (Scary fact though - normal CFLs are only about 20% efficient.. meaning, only 1W out of 5W that goes to powering your bulb is actually turned into light. The other 4W become waste heat. This of course is also the reason that CFLs are considered green - relative to traditional incandescents, they're amazing since traditional bulbs typically convert no more than THREE percent to light.)

This will be a trend that will be very interesting to follow as time goes on. Especially, as pointed out in the article) money comes on-line from the government to support new technologies like LEDs. Anyone out there come into contact with LED lightbulbs on a regular basis in a commercial setting?