Seriously, that is so cool, and looks like a much more stable base for cooking.
I still have two SIGG fuel bottles for my Svea. One time, I went for a quick weekend backpack on the Appalachian Trail by taking a commuter train from NYC into NJ and getting off at a stop that is literally right on the Trail. There was no way to buy butane or kerosene that I could determine (long time ago, no internet and no car) so I had to use gasoline. That Svea worked just fine all weekend. That thing is indestructible.
I’ve been composting stuff in outdoor piles and indoor vermiculture bins since the 1980s. I completely agree that
Urban, developed areas are different than, say, Shawnee National Forest, or Mark Twain National Forest, or Laguna Atascose National Wildlife Refuge. (Been there, loved them all, strongly recommended.) In a developed area, strew coffee grounds under the roses and azaleas with joyous abandon, as long as you’re pretty sure these are not washing into a ditch, creek, etc. I run coffee grounds through my worms first. I kept their bin in the kitchen. It was easy. And there was no smell. Now they are on the porch because it’s Austin and spring started last week.
However.
And again, I do not judge.
I will take this opportunity to share know some of what I know, in case this will illuminate better practices for people who want to do so. (Do I think we’ve really fucked up this planet, ecologically? Yes. Do I withdraw my consent and participation from the wrongness, the madness wherever possible, daily? Yes, as much as I can.)
Much depends on whether the coffee dumping ground is a hole in soil that overlies karst or sand (transmissive, not much filtering) vs clay or silt (better at containing most of the problematic molecules); whether the dumping ground is on a slope, whether rain is expected soon (before the grounds can decompose), how far the dumping ground is from a water body, whether the grounds are likely to rot fast in a given climate, (I agree that the desert is fragile and things don’t decompose quickly there); whether the water body has a robust vegetative buffer to filter runoff from upslope through its roots and aerial parts, or if the water body is bounded by a sandy shore or muddy bank absent of any plants including grasses.
Will coffee grounds leach into a water body, a sink, cave system, or stream connected to a fragile aquifer that has endangered species in it? Some here may dismiss this as precious treehugger nitpickery, but often legal protections of federally listed species provide brakes on rampant development in areas that have inadequate monitoring or enforcement of environmental law. I know this firsthand, less than 100 feet from my front door.
I realize if it is just one camper with a single serving of coffee and coffee grounds, maybe talk of water contamination or ingestion by wildlife is not an issue. What if the area gets a lot of campers daily or annually, and each person is putting coffee grounds on the ground? What is the impact, multiplied by the number of campers, in the given area, which may or may not be fragile?
Suppose the dumping ground is above a direct unfiltered connection to an aquifer through critical environmental features (think: fault line, sink, cave)? That’s certainly what we have here in the central Texas Hill Country. I share my sole source community well (which draws from the middle Trinity aquifer) with about 100 neighbors. We have no other option for water except rainwater collection. Our exceptional drought of record in 2011 had no measurable rain for 18 months and was a terrifying reminder not to screw up the water supply.
In this context I refer to undecomposed coffee grounds that can wash into a water body such as a stream, lake or ocean, as well as pee/poop at a campsite to the vastly larger quantities from wastewater treatment plants unable to remove caffeine from human excreta. Wastewater also contains pharmaceuticals, e.g. antibiotics, birth control pills, steroids, and other stuff we excrete including cancer treatment stuff like radioactive elements and chemotherapy constituents. Once these are in wastewater, these are in our water supply.
