The Italian company CIA has found that the most appropriate way to reuse coffee husks is as a fertiliser and soil conditioner by composting them in organic farms.
Italy's Puglia Region has large expanses of olive groves. Pruning these trees yields around 800 kilotonnes of residual biomass each year and Fiusis uses this biomass to produce energy.
In Italy and France, where the IN.TE.SE project was developed, new decentralised composting services were designed and implemented for domestic and community users, tailored to the local areas.
Coffee grounds contain many nutrients which are excellent for growing mushrooms. This secondary raw material is even ready for use, having been sterilised at 80 to 90°C by the coffee machine. What's left once the mushrooms have been collected is a good fertiliser.
The EU's Bioregio project covered a range of initiatives, all of which are described in its website: from a waste management system in Jelšovce Distillery in Slovakia to biogas units for household applications in Romania and a Spanish project combining the fight against food waste and social inequality.
EntoGreen aims to develop sustainable feed and organic fertilisers by using bio-based technologies to recycle nutrients from agricultural and food waste and reintroducing them into the food chain, thus closing the nutrient cycle.
