Why is Danish festival Smukfest using coffee in their toilets?

10 August 2018

The party has begun in Skanderborg and a long list of national and international top artists are ready to party with the 55,000 guests arriving daily. This year’s festival is the 39^th in a row. Yet again, the festivalgoers can look forward to a week of “anti-everydayness”.

However, not everything is completely the same at the festival. This year there will be coffee in the festival’s toilets. Unfortunately – some might say – not as a hot, reviving drink or with milk. No, the coffee forms part of the soap that the guests wash their hands with. The coffee-soap is one of the new initiatives that the festival has instituted this year in order to reduce waste levels.

The construction of the festival takes months and in the last few weeks, things are very busy, with lots of volunteers. In this context, there is a lot of coffee being brewed, which results in large amounts of coffee grounds – about 15 to 20 kilos a day. These coffee remains have been collected and used as a basis for the soap.

The coffee soap is a pilot project carried out by Agro Business Park under the auspices of the Innovation Network for Biomass (INBIOM) and the project CØ-Hub (Circular Economy Hub). The company Peter Larsen Kaffe (Kaffe is the Danish word for coffee) has delivered the coffee and a company by the name of Kaffe Bueno has refined the coffee grounds and produced the soap.

“The soap is not just a gimmick”, stresses Jacob Mogensen from Agro Business Park and network leader at INBIOM (The Innovation Network for Biomass). He sees great potential in the project and predicts that in short time, more commercial companies will take advantage of the rubbish potential of Danes’ favorite drink.

”Today all womens’ magazines readers knows that coffee grounds are good for washing their hair, as well as for growing flowers. In the future more commercial powers, also Danish, will take advantage of these”.

The product found in the toilets at Smukfest cannot yet compete with the price of traditional soaps. Nevertheless, according to Jacob Mogensen, it can do something else.

”In addition to demonstrating that recycling can take place everywhere – even in a forest, where management and logistics are a challenge – it tells a story reminding us to think a little more about our resource consumption in a simple and fun way”.

One of the projects partners, Kaffe Bueno, has no doubt that reusing coffee can become big business. Its director, Juan Medina, is working on obtaining financing for Scandinavia’s first coffee refinery. Jacob Mogensen and the rest of Agro Business Park believe in the idea, to the extent that it received the prize at Agro Business Park’s innovation contest in 2017.

“As in every bio based concept it needs to be applicable on a large-scale and management and logistics also need to be under control. If they manage to do this, there will also be large opportunities for success,” Jacob Mogensen states.

Background information
INBIOM (The Innovation Network for Biomass) is one of Denmark’s innovation networks, supported by the Danish Ministry of Education and Research.

The project CØ-Hub is a cross-disciplinary collaboration, working towards increasing the effectivity of resources and closing the loop.