Compost is King
Posted by Winston on 02 Feb 2009 at 1:44 pm | Tagged as: Fair Trade, Social Responsibility
Compost is good for coffee trees
There’s a coop in Northern Peru called CHIRINOS that has just embarked on an exciting project with compost. You might think of compost from your kitchen as the stuff full of eggshells and coffee grinds that’s always piling up and begging to be taken out to the garden compost bin. To a small farmer in Peru, compost is essential, especially since many small coffee holder farms in Peru are having problems with tired soil. Working with the support of Sustainable Harvest, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, and our good friend Edgar Blandon from Colombia, CHIRINOS is building their own compost plant to make compost for its farmer members. Called a Peer to Peer program, it’s the result of a timely collaboration between two different coffee farmer coops in two different countries – Peru – where CHIRINOS is and Colombia where Edgar CORPOAGRO is. (We buy a lot of coffee from both coops).
Edgar is being loaned out to CHIRINOS as a Compost Consultant. He’s already been to CHIRINOS once to do soil management and organic fertilizer production training. He’s also been doing some soil analysis, compost facility site analysis, scouring the area for sources of the raw materials for the compost, as well as some training on all the factors that go into making good compost.
Sometime this month, CHIRINOS hopes to break ground on the compost facility.
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Try some of our coffee that might have some beans from CHIRINOS. Maps.
Try some of our coffee that might have some beans from CORPOAGRO. Maps.
What about making the K-Cups compostable. The only thing I hate about being a K-Cup user, is that I feel like I’m not doing my part to cut down on waste. I know this isn’t the first time you’ve heard this. Let’s do our part for the environment.
Hi Adam –
Thanks for your note. We’d love to have a compostable K-Cup but its not possible right now – click through the link below to some discussion we’ve had on this issue in another topic thread.
http://www.greenmountaincafe.com/2008/10/how-should-the-next-k-cup-be/
Best,
Mike
[...] About 2 months ago, I wrote about a compost facility just getting under way in Peru. (Read it here). [...]