Making Compost from Coffee and Paper

hey composting pete here we are going to do uh an eight week experiment we're gonna fill up our 80 gallon lifetime tumbling composter uh as you can see we've got 40 gallons of coffee which even though they're brown color they're considered our composting greens because these are a nitrogen moist although some of them are dry so we might add a little water and then we have our carbon source our composting browns and you can see 10 20 30 40 gallons of that material so we're going to put the 80 gallons in we're going to do it our layered approach green brown green brown uh you could do brown green brown green doesn't really matter [Music] we are collecting coffee grounds from local cafes that was headed to the landfill and i pick up 10 of these buckets a week just from one cafe and in a month time that's a thousand pounds that i'm keeping out of the landfill and turning into soil as we're going to watch over time the shredded paper also can't go in your recycle cart because it's like a confetti explosion when it gets to the recycling center so this also would typically need to be garbage unless again you're composting it like we're doing here so we're taking material headed to the landfill and turning it into living soil the final brown i've got which are 10 gallons this is actually from the coffee roaster and this is what comes off of the coffee beans when they roast so again turning more waste product into living soil okay we've got 80 gallons of material loaded in here we're going to close it up with our lid and then we're going to give it just a couple turns and we'll come back in about a week we'll see how we're doing and we'll just keep tracking this over time till we've got compost we're back at our bin uh if you remember we put in 80 gallons of material 40 gallons of coffee and 40 gallons of shredded paper and a little bit of coffee chaff we're gonna just give it a spin and see what's going on here four days later and here we go okay you can see the steam coming off that's a good sign and we've definitely come down you can just see not much of the shredded paper so we're gonna just keep uh keep our eye on this and it's nice and warm to the touch it's starting to smell a little bit like earth okay we are back it's been exactly two weeks since we loaded up our lifetime 80 gallon tumbler if you recall 40 gallons of coffee and 40 gallons of our carbon mostly shredded paper so we're going to give it a little turn and then we're going to take a look at what we've got inside just turn it one more time here okay well we're ready to open this up and see what we've got going and uh we've come down quite a bit you can't really see any of the paper it's really starting to break down there's a little bit uh it's smelling quite nice actually a lot of a lot of coffee flavor still because we put in so much coffee you can see the moisture is pretty good in here but really it's consumed a lot of that carbon material so we're going to just add two more buckets of our shredded paper and then we'll track this over time so we'll put in one bucket and we'll give that a spin just to mix it up before we put in the other bucket now we'll stick in bucket number two and we'll come back in probably another week and see how we're doing we're back here it's been about 25 days since we started this bin if you remember all coffee and shredded paper for the most part so we're gonna give it a couple spins open it up and see what we got okay well you can see and see some of the heat coming out and you can still see some of the shredded paper but not too much see if we've got some temperature reading in here so we are cooking that's a good sign okay we're at 130 degrees so our bin has really been cooking away i was thinking we might need to add some more shredded paper but i see enough in here you can also see where some of the coffee chunks just didn't get broken down for one reason or another and if you can compare that you can really see our black crumbly compost being start to be made and doesn't really smell at all like coffee now so i am quite pleased with this again day 25 and we'll come back in a few more days and weeks and see if we can turn this into complete compost hi composting pete here and we are back at our band it's now it's now april it's been about six or seven months if you recall we only put coffee grounds and shredded paper into this just to prove that with two ingredients we can turn out an incredible black crumbly compost this is just a little bit moist because it's been sitting out in some of the winter months looks like some water got in here but for the most part this is just beautiful stuff and we're going to be ready to put this into our garden and use it for a valuable amendment for our you soil see any shredded paper in there it just smells like earth

Channel: Composting Pete

Views: 60,066

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Id: C7ODAEwpM1E

Length: 7min 58sec (478 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021