Coflab

Coflab is a Citamine spin-off. Citamine is a citizen movement that aims to turn Mechelen into an edible city through local urban food production. With Coflab, they promote the conversion of unused spaces in the city and locally produced organic waste streams into breeding grounds for local food production. A small scale oyster mushroom nursery has been set up, which is run by citizens who breed the mushrooms on the coffee grit produced as waste by the city departments . Citizens pick up the coffee grits with cargo bikes, and bring them to the nursery where they serve as nutrients for oyster mushrooms, which are then sold on the market to the broad public, as well as to some local restaurants. Thanks to Coflab's workshops, any citizen can learn how to produce oyster mushrooms at home on the basis of one's household coffee waste. Moreover, students from Thomas More university college are experimenting in Coflab thanks to the available equipment, sometimes in collaboration with or commissioned by entreprises, to create new coffee grit-based materials and products for a local bio-economy to be developed.