With a few simple upcycling projects, you can take those old coffee grounds and expired coffee beans and turn them into some pretty useful DIY products.

Coffee is like the peanut butter to my jelly, the milk to my cookies, the Kim to my Kanye. Coffee is the wind beneath my wings, and I would be completely useless without it. Yet, every day I seem to do away with its waste. Old grounds and beans get treated like second class citizens, and ya know what? That needs to change. My coffee deserves more respect, dammit, which is why I’ve found you these totally cool and useful upcycling projects using your leftover coffee stuff.

1. Under Eye Cream

Coffee-infused under eye cream is said to be life-changing. Apparently, this miracle working concoction will help reduce puffiness, reduce the appearance of dark circles, and help with fine lines.

In addition to the coffee oil, which you extract yourself, it calls for a variety of other skin nourishing carrier oils and butters – almost all of which I have used personally at one time or another and have had nothing but positive results. Soap Deli News shares the tutorial you need to conquer this project.

2. Bar Soap

The next upcycled DIY looks super simple to make and doesn’t require a lot of hard-to-find ingredients, precise measurements, or time. Plus, if you like the idea of French vanilla coffee, then you’ll love the smell of this vanilla extract-infused soap.

With just old coffee grounds, glycerine bar soap, vanilla, and equipment, like a muffin tin, you can create an exfoliating and deodorizing soap to help invigorate you morning, noon, and night. Clearly Natural makes a good bar soap that I’ve used before, and is a glycerine-based product that I think would work well for this project. Check out the full tutorial over at Popsugar.

3. Decorative Balls

Everyone needs a decorative ball or two or ten in their lives, but the storebought types are expensive, and can be kinda wasteful. Instead, I’ve got a hybrid project for you (fully upcycled if you use old tennis balls) that uses styrofoam orbs and old coffee beans.

The blogger actually uses beans for eating, but if you follow her instructions over at Love Sweet Love, then I’m confident you can use the expired coffee assortment you have on hand. It’s basically a layer of coordinating paint (brown in this case), some hot glue, and some patience. Other decorative uses for old beans would be filler for jars, and as a base layer in which to nestle your candles.

4. Scented Candle

Speaking of candles, this DIY project is guaranteed to make your house smell like a vanilla latte all day long. The tutorial from Hello Glow calls for using your own gorgeous glassware, reusing unscented candles (or you can buy wax chips), a wick, whole coffee beans, and chopped vanilla beans. I can’t believe how beautiful these look. They would make awesome gifts and the aesthetic possibilities are endless!

5. Face Mask

Take the benefits of coffee to your face by making and using this simple ground face mask. Yes, it might look a little silly at first, but if it’s true that coffee reduces redness, increases circulation, and exfoliates the skin, then it’s totally worth it.

Beauty Banter uses whole ground coffee beans, but you can simply apply the grounds from this morning’s coffee. Combine these with a few other natural ingredients like honey, lemon juice, cocoa powder, and milk or almond milk, and you’ll be ready for your close-up in no time.

6. Wood Stain

If you’re turned off by the idea of using a stinky, toxic commercial wood stain, then you’ll love this new medium. DIY Vintage Chic has a great tutorial on how to create and use a coffee and vinegar based wood stain. The results are subtle at first, but after allowing it to sit for a week, the finished product is quite impressive. Not only that, but it’s natural, uses your old grounds, and doesn’t emit any noxious chemicals.

I hope you’ve been inspired by these upcycled projects that utilize old coffee beans and grounds. If you go through as much coffee as I do, then you know just how useful these can be. Let us know you thoughts on the EcoSalon Facebook page!

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Column Are you buying whole coffee beans, or a bunch of filler?

Let’s have a chat about coffee.

Coffee is one of those products that comes from far far away, but it’s one of the non-local items that I have chosen to not remove from my diet. There are other tropical goods I’d rather get rid of first – bananas I can live without for example – and when it comes to eating locally and in season, you have to pick your battles. In the battle of me versus coffee, coffee wins every single time.

Coffee is one of those products like chocolate: if you’re going to drink it, it’s very important to buy the good stuff, and not just for taste reasons. There are plenty of hidden costs in fast coffee. With an industry made up of mostly multinational corporations buying coffee based on price and not quality, it’s no surprise that the most vulnerable ones in coffee production are the people working to produce it, with lots of stories of worker exploitation from bad housing conditions to child labor.

Which means you want to know what you’re buying and who you’re buying it from. And if you needed yet another reason to buy whole coffee beans from roasters committed to ethical trade, instead of pre-packaged, pre-ground stuff from large corporations, here’s yet another one: the coffee you’re buying might not just be coffee.

New research from the American Chemical Society shows that if you’re buying pre-ground coffee there’s a pretty big chance that the coffee has other stuff in it.

Wood, barley, rye, corn, soybeans? These do not a coffee make, and yet according to the ACS, they’re commonly used as fillers in coffee. While the ingredients aren’t harmful to you the consumer, they’re all about making coffee more profitable for the companies producing them. “With a lower supply of coffee in the market, prices rise, and that favors fraud because of the economic gain,” research leader Suzana Lucy Nixdorf, Ph.D. said in a statement.

Of course if you buy pre-ground coffee, unless you’re kitted out with a set up to test for various chemical compounds in your coffee, you might never know that you’re drinking a rye, soybean, coffee blend. That’s because “after roasting and grinding the raw material, it becomes impossible to see any difference between grains of lower cost incorporated into the coffee, especially because of the dark color and oily texture of coffee,” says Nixdorf.

The ACS doesn’t identify who exactly is using filler in their coffee, so what’s your answer if you want to avoid filler? Buy whole beans.

Certainly, if you’re a coffee lover you know that buying whole beans and grinding them at home is a must if you want the best taste. But even if you’re not a coffee nerd, I think we can all agree that you don’t necessarily want to be drinking a soybean filler, now do you? Buy from roasters that know where their beans come from and are committed to not only making good coffee, but making sure that the people producing the coffee are able to make a fair living.

If you’re committed to real food, coffee should be yet another thing that you pay attention to. Vote with your fork and your coffee cop. And for the love of god, don’t buy coffee pods. 

Related on EcoSalon

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: American Chemical Society

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Coffee beans are having a rough go in Central America, on account of a fungus called “Coffee Rust” that’s fueled by climate change. 

If you drank a cup of coffee this morning, you’re not alone. Globally, we drink 1.6 billion cups of coffee a day. Coffee is the second most sought after commodity in the world, beat out only by oil. To say coffee is a big industry would be an understatement.

But most of us rarely think about where our coffee comes from. Sure, we may choose one roaster over another, but beyond that, few of us have a connection to where our coffee beans originated. But those coffee beans are going through some rough times, which sooner or later, may be reflected in your cup.

Currently there’s a fungus wreaking havoc on coffee crops in Central America. In the 2012-2013 crop year, the fungal parasite Hemileia vastatrix (also known as “coffee rust”) caused nearly $499 million in losses. A problem for the last six years, scientists have estimated that it could destroy up to 40 percent of the region’s crops. But while crops often deal with diseases, there is one thing that has made this one even worse: climate change.

Dramatic changes in weather patterns are fueling the spread of the coffee rust fungus. Coffee is very sensitive to weather, but while normal weather patterns used to be more consistent, fueled by climate change, now they are much more dramatic and chaotic.

“We used to think that seasons were not that important; now we see that they’re incredibly important,” Alvaro Gaitan, head of plant pathology at Colombia’s National Coffee Research Center told National Geographic.

The spores of the coffee rust fungus need a lot of moisture to grow, and while the right conditions for the fungus usually only exist during the rainy season, climate variation is making for heavier rains in the region, and more frequently. Further south, Brazil is dealing with the opposite problem: the drastic changes in climate have led to a drought, and it lost nearly one-fifth of the usual 55 million bags of coffee beans that it produces.

All of this climate related destruction of course had an impact on the price of coffee: Coffee prices rose worldwide from $1.20 per pound to nearly $2.20. Earlier this year, Starbucks decided to stop buying coffee until the market stabilized.

But while we may be forced to pay more for our coffee, that’s nothing compared to what the farmers of Central America are going through. According to a report by the International Coffee Organization, around 374,000 jobs were lost during the 2012-2013 season because of the rust, making for a significant social impact in local communities. In Guatemala alone, producers lost between a third and 60 percent of their total income, spurring the United Nations to provide emergency food aid to affected households.

A coalition that includes USAID and Starbucks was launched to provide assistance to producers, to the tune of $23 million.

What does the future look like for coffee? Complicated. Genetically modified rust-resistant seeds are one option, removing sick plants and replacing them with new ones is another. What the rust crisis is showing us is how fragile the coffee supply system is, and in a world where coffee is of high demand, it’s something we’re going to be forced to think about.

No matter what, your quiet routine of drinking your morning cup of coffee certainly isn’t as simple as it seems.

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Image: trophygeek

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We love our coffee. And we may think nothing of tipping the hardworking barista at the local café for slinging a fancy cappuccino our way. But what about the farmer who grew the coffee beans in the first place? They probably have the harder job of the two, but in all likelihood, are vastly underpaid for the work they do. In fact, they may make so little that they can no longer sustain their farming practice. Yet here we are spending $15-$20 for a sack of coffee beans without blinking an eye. Isn’t it time the farmers got their fair share?

TraceableCoffee.org is hoping to accomplish just that. The project aims to connect coffee drinkers with the small-scale farmers who grow the coffee beans. So, how does it work? Simply buy and enjoy Traceable Coffee at select retailers throughout the country. The packaging then has a code, which when entered on their website or scanned directly with your smart phone, will then trace you back to the farmer. How nifty is that!

The website tells you about the farmers including a selection of videos. Then, if you want to tip the farmer, all you have to do is add money to a virtual tip jar online that eventually gets sent directly to the farmer.

I can’t help but think of the implications of transparency that come with this technology. For example, if you could see exactly who is farming the cattle where that steak came from”¦

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Scientists in Brazil are finding that un-roasted coffee beans, which contain large amounts of globulins proteins, work well to naturally ward off insects.

Paulo Mazzafera and his colleagues are working to develop the globulins to protect food crops. Their study appears in the February 2010 issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

The insecticidal properties of the purified proteins were tested against the cowpea weevil using artificial diets; and the results showed that small amounts of coffee proteins killed up to half of the insects.

In the future, scientists could potentially breed these globulin proteins into crops so plants would theoretically produce their own defenses against insects.

And no need to worry, globulins proteins are destroyed when the beans are roasted, so you won’t be sipping on insecticide in your next cup of coffee.

View the report: “Purification of Legumin-Like Proteins from Coffea arabica and Coffea racemosa Seeds and Their Insecticidal Properties toward Cowpea Weevil (Caliosobruchus maculates) (Coleoptera: Bruchidae).”

Image: Aidan Wojtas

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