In 2015, UK-based roaster Lincoln & York received more than 90,000 bags of green coffee, all made from jute, a rough natural fibre made from the stems of the white jute plant. Like many coffee roasters it has long been faced with an issue about what to do with the bags, but it has found a way of reprocessing them locally, into environmentally friendly carpet underlay."Having been ripped open to empty the green coffee into the silos at our roastery, the bags are shaken thoroughly to remove loose beans and then layered onto pallets where they are stored indoors ready for collection," the company explained. The empty sacks then make their way to K&H Ellis in Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, to one of just two jute processing plants in the UK, where Howard and Bernadette Ellis work in an early 20th mill to transform the used jute bags into bales of shredded fibres.
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