General objectives: • To educate coffee consumers to adopt sustainable habits. • To provide coffee shop owners, employees and coffee professionals with the knowledge to contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the circular economy in the coffee sector. • To develop cooperation between consumers and cafés to achieve the above objectives. Specific objectives: • Production of a needs analysis report (using internet research and questionnaires). • Creating an e-guide to sustainable coffee (using the above report). • Production of educational videos (based on the needs analysis report). • Establishment of ECOffee Sustainable Cafeteria Cluster (recruitment of 5 cafeterias per partner, 30 in total). • Creation of a smartphone application (for cafés and coffee consumers). • Training 84 people on the basics of sustainable consumption of coffee (international and national training). • Dissemination of project results (through traditional and social media). • Creating a project website to disseminate all relevant project results.
Nowadays, there is a strong political and social demand to reduce waste from human activities. Food waste is a growing stream of waste that needs to be managed with great care. EU Directive 2018/850 places severe restrictions on the landfilling of all recyclable waste. The main objective is to encourage a shift to a circular economy through prevention, reuse, recycling and recovery. Europe has the world's highest coffee dependency, accounting for around 33% of the world's coffee consumption. On average, a European consumes around 5 kg of coffee per year, resulting in approximately 10 kg of wet SCG (Spent Coffee Grounds). At the same time, SCG has many recycling potentials, which are actually hardly used in many places (most of the SCG is disposed of in landfills). This has led the consortium to decide to focus our joint activities on promoting sustainable coffee consumption. Our purpose was to foster cooperation between coffee houses and coffee consumers with the aim of offering solutions to create more sustainable and environmentally friendly coffee drinking habits and to propose ways to recycle SCG.