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Social enterprise Reground, which helps businesses across Victoria divert spent coffee grounds from landfill, has been announced as the official sustainability partner of Melbourne International Coffee Expo (MICE) 2024.
“Like anyone else in the industry, MICE is a highlight of the calendar for the Reground team,” says Fiona Parsons, Reground Communications Manager.
“We absolutely live for the events and catching up with friends from across the industry. It’s only natural that an event of this calibre would be among the first to take their coffee waste seriously and commit to delivering it to local gardeners instead of to landfill and we’re proud to have a relationship with the Expo spanning years.”
Reground will be working alongside MICE to collect all the used coffee grounds from this year’s event, which takes place at Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre from 12 to 14 May.
“A major focus for us at this year’s event will be product stewardship. This is a conversation the coffee industry (particularly coffee roasters marketing on sustainability values) desperately needs to have and we’re excited to be creating the space for it,” says Fiona.
“Product stewardship is an amazing opportunity for progressive roasters to step up and create positive outcomes for their coffee that are truly end-to-end: at the moment, this doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. At Reground, we believe Australia can lead the entire industry towards making our coffee habits healthy for people and the planet.”
For the 2023 event, Reground challenged the MICE organisers to step up their waste game and Fiona says they were more than supportive of the social enterprise’s vision.
“In addition to our usual resource recovery work, we set up a provocative activation designed to bring waste out of the shadows by calling attention to the huge amount of coffee Melbourne’s cafes are still sending to landfill: it was a huge success and a massive conversation-starter,” she says.
“In 2024, we’ll be levelling up our previous efforts yet again: our team will be on the ground rescuing coffee from landfill during the event – we’ll be doing this in-person, during the day and on the show floor because we believe that we have to see waste to be able to really understand and tackle it. We’re also thrilled to be presenting as part of this year’s Cafe Owner’s Education Series, talking about the future of the circular economy in coffee and supporting coffee professionals to make simple, sustainable changes in their businesses with tangible social and environmental outcomes.”
Reground was founded in 2014 by barista Ninna Larsen as a resource to help cafés reduce waste and recycle better. Since then, it has saved 1,544,000 kilograms of coffee from landfill and prevented 3,227,970 kilograms of harmful emissions.
Find out more about Reground here.
Find out more about MICE2024 here.
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