Translator: Rafael Pompa Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Adam Sayner: You might be forgiven for thinking
that this was going to be some kind of sci-fi apocalyptic vision of the future,
but I'm happy to say that it's not.
We're going to be talking a little bit
about how you can turn a huge urban waste stream
in the form of waste coffee grounds into delicious gourmet oyster mushrooms
and why the very best place to do that is in our cities.
We should also look how this idea is already beginning to catch on
in urban areas around the world.
But I can see a couple of slightly bemused looking faces in the audience,
and you're probably wondering 'How on earth did they get into this?'
So we'll go back in time to 2011.
I had not long finished university
and set up a small business growing mushrooms in the traditional way
on straw and sawdust,
and about a year into that,
came across the fact you could grow on waste coffee grounds,
and I knew instantly that it was a fantastic idea.
Not only was there all of this waste,
but it was actually easier to grow mushrooms on coffee
than it was in the way I'd been doing so already.
So overnight I switched focus of the business and ran some trials,
and I remember distinctly going into Plymouth
to pick up loads of coffee in the run-up to Christmas one year.
Everybody is walking along with their shopping bags,
and I was pushing a trolley with black bin bags full of waste coffee
through the middle of this shopping centre,
and I look up, and in front of me stood a security guard.
And he looked at me very strangely and said, 'What are you doing?'
And I explained, 'Well, you know, I´m taking all this waste coffee
and using it to grow mushrooms.'
And he looked so, so confused at the whole thing.
However, had I been able to show him this picture at the time,
maybe he would've understood it a little bit better.
What you can see there is the waste from about 1,000 cups of coffee
being very quickly, in the space of just four weeks,
turned into a delicious crop of oyster mushrooms.
And when I look at this photo, it still inspires me to this day,
the potential to use nature and the evolution of a biological organism
to solve some of our biggest problems.
And you might ask 'Well, is coffee waste such a problem in the first place?'
And yes, it is, basically.
You probably have noticed, over the last five or ten years,
hundreds of coffee shops springing up on our high streets,
yet it's an incredibly wasteful process.
So I'm just going to walk you through, very briefly,
the stages from coffee bean to the cup that you enjoy.
Just think about the waste that goes into each step of that process.
So the coffee plant is produced in the country of origin
and all the time and resources and energy that goes into that.
It's then picked, dried, milled, packed up,
and shipped halfway across the world
where it's then roasted at high temperature,
transported to the cafés where it's ground,
put through an espresso machine,
and we get that lovely, liquid extract to drink and enjoy.
Now, here's the interesting thing:
Less than one percent of the biomass of the plant
that's gone through this whole process
ends up in the drink, you know, it's the liquid extract.
The waste coffee grounds are usually just tapped out in the bin
and buried in landfill.
Incredibly wasteful, but the silver lining to all this
is the fact that they're incredibly good, then, for growing mushrooms on.
They're full of nutrients,
they've just been pasteurized by the brewing process,
which makes it easier to grow mushrooms on,
and the mushrooms can come along
and sort of mop up this huge waste stream problem that we've created.
Eric Jong: So those were Adam's first steps in GroCycle's business,
and let's fast forward a few years
to when we're the proud operators of the UK's first urban mushroom farm.
I'm sat in some luxurious offices in the heart of Exeter,
and they're not unlike the offices I used to work in in London
when I worked for major energy companies.
So these offices are supposed to be comfortable, right?
But I wasn't comfortable at all, I was sick to my stomach.
I'd just been handed some bad news,
and I'm sure most of you are familiar with the feeling,
you just want to curl up.
What was the bad news?
Well, we were the proud operators of this farm,
and the landlord had just told us - this was at the start of this year -
that we had to be out in a very short space of time.
So, there I was, sat, pondering, looking out the window,
thinking, what does this actually mean?
Is this the end for what we've been doing? We've been working at this for years now.
And I wasn't sure we'd have the drive to do it all again,
so felt pretty sorry for myself.
And then the landlord interrupted the silence
and said, 'Look, but, you know, I've got some news as well.
There's an unused floor, right above us here,
and would you like to have a look?'
And we had a look, and it's just a completely empty floor,
hardly used - there's plenty of those spaces in every city in the UK,
I regret to say.
And his question was, 'Would you like to build your urban mushrooms farm here?'
It didn't take us all that long to say, 'Yes, we'll do that.'
But that also meant we needed to find some money
to invest in this,
and we needed to design and build the new farm.
So we did all that with the amazing support
of backers through a crowdfunding campaign.
And we built and designed the farm in less than a month.
And this,
here is the result.
So you can see those are the bags that Adam showed you earlier,
and this
is right in the heart of the city.
Now, at this stage, some of you might be wondering,
so what is the big deal? Why are you in the city?
And besides the reason that there's plenty of waste over there,
there's also that the demand for the food.
There's some other compelling reasons too:
So the United Nations predicted by 2050,
70 percent of the world's population will live in the cities.
So that simple fact means that we need to carefully consider
how we structure these cities,
and we think that farms such as this one
should be in the fabric of all the cities around the world.
Now, don't get us wrong,
we don't mean to say that this is the answer,
the answer to all of our problems.
We just simply think it's part of an answer.
So, that's in [2050],
but even if you look right at this moment,
30 percent of the world's food production never reaches a dinner table.
That's 30 percent.
So we've got these enormously long, complex, supply chains
with bottlenecks inevitable in various stages,
and it simply never reaches our table.
What we do here hardly has got any supply chain involved in it -
it's local food production.
So how much could we do?
Well, to run our farm, we pick up about -
from five cafés
we pick up nearly 500 kilograms of coffee waste each week.
If all of us would get involved -
there's 17,000 coffee shops in the UK alone at this moment -
if all of us would get involved and start making mushrooms -
I can't see it happen next year but perhaps in the future -
we'd be talking about producing about 300 tons of mushrooms each week,
and that's an awful lot of mushrooms.
AS: So this brings us back to the original question:
Will mushrooms take over our cities?
And perhaps it's a bit too early to say.
But I can certainly see a world five to ten years from now
where there's a farm like that in every city in the world,
recycling waste into food for local consumption.
Now, over the last couple of years, we have got a lot of emails from people
that have been asking us 'Well, how do you do this?
How do you grow mushrooms from coffee?'
And to begin with we used to answer every single one of them,
and it didn't take us long to realise
that was not the best way of teaching this idea to people.
When mushrooms grow in the wild,
they tend to underneath the soil grow out in all directions
in this very intricate and amazing network of almost like a set of roots.
And the famous mycologist Paul Stamets likens this structure to the internet
in the way that ideas spread and are intermingled and connect,
and new things come out of them.
So it was only natural for us to turn to the internet
as a means to spread this idea.
So we formed an online course as a way to teach the technique,
and it turns out the internet really is a great place
for spreading ideas
because within six months of launching the course,
we had hundreds of members in more than 23 countries around the world
on six different continents.
Some of those people are now going on to set up projects of their own.
So this idea of where it might lead to is already in motion.
EJ: So when we set out to do this, when we started this journey,
we had no idea of where it would take us, it's all uncharted territory.
Plenty of people thought we were absolutely crazy,
and there have been a lot of bumps along the way.
But by taking small steps forward, we are making a difference now,
so if anybody here has got an idea that they think can make a difference,
we'd encourage you to go for it.
It's not only by taking action,
it's also about inviting other people into your way of thinking.
And you will never know where that might lead to.
Thank you.
(Applause)