In Montreal, mushrooms make the local economy go round

MONTREAL: While delivering oyster mushrooms to restaurants in the heart of Montreal, Lysiane Roy Maheu stops to get a bucket filled with coffee grounds from a barista friend. She needs it for her next crop.

Mixed with residues from local micro-breweries, the grounds will provide rich nutrients for cultivating the sumptuous fungi.

They are grown in pierced plastic buckets stacked two metres (six feet) high in a warehouse located in a former working-class, but now quickly gentrifying, Montreal neighbourhood.

Three times a week, Roy Maheu and her friend Dominique LynchGauthier, both 35, harvest about 200 kilograms (about 440 pounds) of mushrooms, which are delivered to area restaurants the same day.

This is the so-called circular economy – one that looks to boost productivity by recycling and recovering resources, all while reducing waste and avoiding pollution - at work.

By cultivating mushrooms from recycled resources, “we’ve eliminated waste,” explains LynchGauthier, co-founder of the urban farm specializing in high-quality oyster mushrooms, Blanc de Gris.

“Waste is simply a resource that has been put in the wrong place,” she says, citing a founding principle of circular economies.

The pair started the company three years ago, and they sing the praises of recycling as a way to significantly reduce costs, as well as being environmentally sustainable.

To make their product, a mushroom culture is mixed with the coffee grounds and brewery dregs recovered from neighbourhood watering holes in buckets, rather than in disposable plastic bags used by most other mushroom houses.

There is no delivery waste either. Plastic bins used to deliver the mushrooms are returned to the vendor and used over and over.

“Any residue from the crop could be used as compost in vegetable gardens,” notes Lynch-Gauthier.

Roy Maheu has long worked in the restaurant industry and knows how important it is to personally approach chefs at Montreal’s best restaurants, to put the mushrooms in front of them to examine and taste.