I still remember those hot afternoons on my uncle’s coffee plantation in Minas Gerais, Brazil. He’s a coffee farmer — and he knows the value of every single bean like no one else.

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We were sitting on the veranda when he started telling stories from the past — about the countless trucks roaring past his fields, loaded with tons of spent coffee grounds.

He spoke of kilometer-long columns of smoke rising into the sky, of a gray, acrid haze hanging over the landscape. For days, the air was filled with the pungent smell of burnt coffee grounds.

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Yes, coffee grounds used to be burned — and in many places, they still are. Just not out in the open anymore, but in the combustion furnaces of the coffee industry.

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“Tens of thousands of tons — just burned,” he said. That sentence stuck with me. I kept wondering: Can’t we give this “waste” a second life?

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Back home, I talked to my husband Robin. He’s an architect, working with wood-based materials every day. He told me about the growing deforestation crisis, the spruce dieback across Europe and the resulting supply shortages and rising prices in the wood products industry.

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That was a turning point for me.

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What if we stopped burning coffee grounds — and started turning them into panels that save wood?

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That question was the beginning of S.T.U.R.C.

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Today, we’re building a future from coffee waste. With strong partners.
And we invite you to build it with us.