 There is between 500 to 1,000 kilograms of waste coffee grounds produced per week from all the cafes on campus. I'm a senior tutor in biology and I coordinate the 102 botany course. The material that the lab fungi grow on before was just an agar gel in a plastic petri dish. The technicians would produce around four or five hundred of these things for that one experiment and then they just throw the plastic away. So I just wanted to have a look at another way that we could teach fungi to the students in stage rumbotany. So I chose coffee grounds and with the help of the supplier of the spawn I designed an experiment and I trialled it out. I'm holding here in my hands the fruiting bodies of the oyster mushroom. These are actually dry. I decided to put them into the old aquarium downstairs in my lab area and grew them up. So two weeks later I had quite a few flushes of oyster mushrooms. The coffee ground mixture that the students use is about a kilogram of coffee grounds, 100 grams of mushroom spawn and about 100 grams of water. Using the coffee grounds does make them think about waste. And especially waste around the university as well. We need to look at it and I think that the students really do get on board with that. They're actually taking a waste product and have the potential to grow a food source from it. We had planned as a group to have a little mushroom party. We could make some pizzas and stuff like that but no such joy. Not yet. As it progressed I did really enjoy the fact that the students got into it. I thought it was cool that we used coffee grounds from the university cafes. It was kind of a cool way to use some of the five products of our campus. It's like the most efficient way of recycling because not only do you get money but you get rid of all the waste and everyone's happy. And you get a food. Even though it started out as an experiment just to replace the boring, fungly lab that we had prior to that, it's grown and the students have really gone into it. It was more engaging because we got to take them home. And you got to see how it grew. It was at home you had to say it. You couldn't smell it.