Siri Mittet

Siri was born and raised in Ålesund, Norway. She has a master’s degree in Public Health and in Environment and Sustainable Development from England and the USA. For a long time she has been concerned with resource issues and after her studies in London she pursued teaching-related work related to waste issues. Siri has great faith in local commitment and is the initiator of both Green Drinks Oslo (2009) and the Transition Town initiative Omstilling Sagene (2011).

She is most famous for Gruten, a venture that recycles 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 Siri stepped forward with a great plan!

Under Siri’s leadership, 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.

Her interest in coffee grounds and its possibilities started sometime in 2011 when Siri built an earthworm compost bin on in a green area in Sagene, Oslo. She began to feed the field with large quantities of coffee grounds, which the field, and the worms, loved very much. After a lot of research and visits to exciting projects abroad, her business Gruten was born.