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By Mariana Seda
A team of students is closing the loop on food waste by developing a process to cultivate mushroom growth in used coffee grounds. Their goal? To create a product that allows people to grow fresh, nutritious, and accessible produce in their own homes by reusing the vast amounts of coffee ground waste generated by local businesses.
Jasper Nord, Margot O’Malley, and Thomas George, all students in the Bachelor of Science in Sustainable Design program, first met in an online sustainable design group chat in fall 2023. O’Malley was seeking collaborators to enter the Reimagine our Future Undergraduate Sustainability Competition, a competition that encourages students to develop projects to address the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (or SDGs) including issues like climate change and food insecurity.
The Sporecycle team repurposed used coffee cups as mini mushroom growing kits and handed them out at a student event during the spring 2024. Sporecycle logo and website designed by sustainable design graduate Thomas George.
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Their resulting project, Sporecycle, emerged from an idea Nord had been experimenting with for some time. He had successfully grown oyster mushrooms in used coffee grounds in his own home using stems purchased from a grocery store. His interest piqued, Nord enrolled in IB 471: Fungal Diversity and Ecology where he learned how to culture and work with fungi in a laboratory setting.
“Coffee grounds are such a prominent waste product produced everyday and very consistently in urban areas,” said Nord. “Our idea addressed an existing problem with a feasible solution, and it fit our group’s interest in providing community food and access to fresh produce in various areas.”
Together, the students developed the idea for a program wherein they would partner with local coffee shops to collect used grounds regularly. Then, the team would add spores to the sterilized grounds, allowing mushroom growth to take root. Ultimately, they planned to create refillable “grow kits” that locals could take home with them to continue growing and using the fresh mushrooms in their home food making.
To their surprise, Sporecycle won the competition, opening them up to a wide-ranging network of support beyond the cash prize that included advisors and professional connections to help them progress their winning idea into a product and business model, starting with a new collaboration with local business BrewLab Coffee for regular coffee grounds collection.
George’s interest in user interface design and experience guided his development of a business brand, website, and a marketing plan. Neither O’Malley nor George had previous experience with mushroom cultivation, but they both took studio class ARTD 451: Ethics of a Designer in a Global Economy with Eric Benson, a professor of art and design, that helped inform their ideas for this project.
The Sporecycle team repurposed used coffee cups as mini mushroom growing kits and handed them out at a student event during the spring 2024. Sporecycle logo and website designed by sustainable design graduate Thomas George.
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Newly graduated, George and O’Malley will continue to work on Sporecycle as they also start jobs and internships related to their sustainable design interests. Nord, now a senior, will advance the project with continued research and development in the lab. They plan to build more partnerships with local coffee shops, pursue business licensure, and have a viable and distributable product by the end of the year.
The students attribute their success to the many mentors and teachers they have worked with over the past year. Karin Hodgin Jones, the director for the Sustainable Design Program, provided guidance not only on the project, but for the students navigating this young degree program and pursuing ideas at the intersections of many different interests.
“I really admire how interdisciplinary the sustainable design program is,” stated O’Malley. “We have our core classes in architecture, planning, and design, but everyone has such varying interests and it’s really cool to see how people take sustainable design in different directions.”