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Breaking New Grounds
Heine Brothers' Coffee has been on the path to greater sustainability for many years. We've been recycling our milk jugs, bottles, cans, newspapers, magazines and cardboard from our now seven stores. The city doesn't yet offer commercial recycling so we pay our staff to box up our recyclables, load them into our van and take them to the recycling center a couple times each week. We figure it's our trash, so it's our responsibility to recycle it.
Four years ago, company co-owners Mike Mays and Gary Heine wondered how to turn the 60 tons of coffee grounds our cafes produce each year into a resource. The result was Breaking New Grounds, a non-profit that composts our coffee grounds with other local food waste, hay, distillery grains and shredded newspaper and cardboard from our stores. We then feed this compost to our thousands of redworms who ingest it and excrete it as worm compost - a rich soil nutrient that holds water and adds texture to garden or houseplant soil. We sell the bags of worm compost in our stores to raise money for a 2-3 acre organic farm we will start in one of Louisville's many food deserts (a district with little or no access to foods needed to maintain a healthy diet) where we'll grow food, farmers, and jobs with our neighbors.
Breaking New Grounds is a new Louisville non-profit organization dedicated to growing food, connecting neighbors, and transforming waste into wealth. The Breaking New Grounds concept is to develop a neighborhood-based, community food system with local farmers and other partners across the city that will:
- Grow food, grow farmers and grow jobs.
- Empower local farmers, our neighbors and ourselves to create healthy worm compost, bountiful organic gardens, nutritious food, neighborhood-based economic development and community from food and other waste that is currently landfilled.
- Provide healthy food to neighbors and local non-profits.
- Provide new job skills and incomes in neighborhoods where residents are underemployed.
- Serve as a farm incubator & farmer training center to build economic growth and the local food economy.
Click here to visit www.BreakingNewGrounds.org!
