Coffee is a necessity when traveling and the San Diego International Airport is putting tons of discarded coffee grounds to environmental use.
San Diego’s airport is the first airport in the nation that has a formal sustainability policy. Tons of food is recycled each month, including a quarter of which is from coffee grounds.
That boils down to six tons of coffee grounds a month recycled into compost.
All 12 coffee shops at the airport participate. The airport’s major food concessionaire, HMSHost, first pitched the sustainability idea to the airport after noticing how much food was wasted each month.
“We had all these waste buckets and we saw all this coffee ground going to the buckets and realized 'hey' this is something we can do to help the environment and started the program,” said Joe Niknam, a representative of HMSHost.
The program also saves the airport $4,000 per year on waste hauling and disposal services.
If you want to pick up some of the airport’s compost, head to Miramar Greenery where you can get some for free.
