Gruten

Founded by the irrepressible Siri Mittet, Gruten is a fabulous venture recycling something that many of us don’t spend a second thinking about – used coffee grounds. In Norway alone (a small country with only 5 million people), around 7 million cups of real coffee are drunk every day. In Oslo, the capital city of less than 1 million people, this equates to around 10 tonnes of used coffee grounds every day. That’s a lot of mulch, which was often not put to good use at all …until that is Gruten stepped forward with a great plan!

This happy bunch of people cycle around the City every day in their wonderfully chic transport bikes and collect as many coffee grounds as they can. They then turn this waste into an array of fantastic products.

Here is a list of their wares:

• fertiliser for garden and house plants
• soaps and scrubs so you can look after your skin
• array of growing kits for mushrooms (based on the wonderful soil/fertiliser they produce)

The group calls the coffee waste they collect Oslo’s ‘black gold’, a label that many of the retail outlets in Oslo that now stock Gruten’s products would most probably agree with. And just in case you needed one more reason to support their work, this is a pure social venture in the recycling economy with a great conscience – all the profits produced by the business are circulated back into operations or used to support other socially responsible projects.