Here’s one of the 100 innovations that appears in the new website and eponymous book, “The Blue Economy”, which highlight simple, well-designed, and ecological technologies that can be sustainably and profitably integrated into economies around the world:
Coffee: from Pulp to Protein
Have you ever wondered how much coffee from the farm actually ends up in your cup in the morning? From the biomass harvested at the farm in Colombia or Zimbabwe, only 0.2 percent is ingested, the rest is simply left to rot.
The Chinese scientist Shuting Chang demonstrated in his lab in Hong Kong that coffee serves as an ideal substrate for farming tropical mushrooms like shiitake or ganoderma. But coffee waste is not only an ideal substrate: it generates jobs, income and food security. Chido Govero, an orphan from Zimbabwe, set up her own business of mushroom farming on coffee waste, and thus generates food and job security in Africa.
In 2009 a couple of graduates from Berkeley University started a business collecting the coffee waste from the coffee shops to grow mushrooms in the inner city, providing competitive and high quality food while generating jobs. Wherever in the world people farm or drink coffee, in the city or countryside, waste can be converted to protein.
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The recently launched website includes a work-in-progress ‘community‘ section in they are to present a new innovation a week, and invite others to share ideas, news and engage in discussion on what might be termed ‘sustainable social entrepreneurship’.
