Making Compost from Coffee and Paper

Hey, Composting Pete here. We are going to do an eight-week experiment. We're going to fill up our 80-gallon Lifetime Tumbling Composter. As you can see, we've got 40 gallons of coffee, which even though they're brown colored, 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. You could do brown, green, brown, green, doesn't really matter. 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's 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 until we've got compost. We're back at our bin. 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 going to 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 going to just 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 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. One more time here. Okay, well, we're ready to open this up and see what we've got going. And 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. It's smelling quite nice, actually. A lot of coffee flavor still, because we've 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. Then 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 going to give it a couple spins, open it up, and see what we've got. Well, you can 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 bin. 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. It 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 soil. You can't see any shredded paper in there. It just smells like earth.