Re purpose Your Coffee Grounds: 4 Ideas

After you brew your Sasquatch Coffee every morning, don’t toss all of your grounds away into the compost or trash! There are great ways to give new life to your used coffee grounds! Read through 4 ideas for using spent coffee grounds here:

Deodorize your fridge

After your coffee is brewed, put the grounds to work again—this time as a powerful odor absorber inside your fridge. Leaving a bowlful of used grounds in the fridge overnight will rid your icebox of icky odors, according to Apartment Therapy. Repeat as often as you’d like. If you’re battling particularly potent odors, feel free to leave the grounds in the fridge until the job is done.

Scour pans, tools, etc

Eliminate stubborn, stuck-on grime by scrubbing with a couple spoonfuls of coffee grounds. The gentle abrasion provides extra scouring power to clean the dirtiest of dishes and pans. “You don’t need to mix in soap, just use a thin cloth to get the abrasive action working,” says Melissa Maker, host of the Clean My Space channelon YouTube and founder of a Toronto-based cleaning service of the same name. Before scouring the whole pan, test a small area to make sure the grounds don’t stain the surface—and never use on delicate ceramic or non-stick surfaces.

Attract earthworms to your garden

Just like sleep-starved teachers and long-haul truckers, earthworms L-O-V-E coffee. And you know what happy earthworms do to soil? Make it a whole lot richer! “They’re attracted to organic material like coffee grounds, and they help distribute it through the soil,” says Melinda Myers, a gardening expert, author, and host of the How to Grow Anything DVD set. A healthy worm population enhances the quality of garden soil by stimulating microbial activity, churning the soil, improve water-holding capacity and water filtration, providing channels for root growth, and burying plant residue, according to the USDA.

For optimal results, sprinkle your soil with a 1/2-inch-thick layer of coffee grounds, says Myers.

Clean smelly hands

Rub hands with a scoopful of spent grounds to eliminate odors from fish, garlic, and other strong-smelling foods. “There’s no need to mix with soap,” says Maker. “Your hands may have a coffee smell, but it will remove the more unpleasant odor, and you can wash with soap after rinsing the grounds off your hands.”