Travel-Hacks | Used Coffee Grounds As Dish Soap Substitute

When living life on the road people look for all sorts of hacks that help to live a more balanced life. Often this comes in connection with the desire to put as little of a strain on the environment as possible and to drastically reduce unnecessary items in the household - after all, space in a van is limited and saving money for things that are not entirely essential is a welcome strategy in the long run.

And since we have used this hack a few times by now, might as well share it here with you all.

I confess, I am somewhat of a coffee junkie, sometimes more sometimes less but we do have a French press with us and I start off most days on the road with a can of coffee, especially now that we are in winter and it's cold.

But the damn coffee grounds! It's always a hassle putting them into a trash bin because they're wet and will make a mess of the garbage bag. I once stumbled upon the hack that they are great in the garden because they help fertility in the soil as they decompose, but a friend of ours has recently sparked the idea to re-use them the next day - for doing the dishes.

It feels really good to make use of the coffee grounds again long after the coffee for the day has been emptied. They are like sand almost, or sanding paper, easily clearing away all sorts of dried leftovers in pans and pots. If used with a dishwashing brush they are easily moved about the dirty dishes and can quickly be poured into the next dish until the whole array of items has been thoroughly cleaned.

Then simply rinse your dishes once and you are done.

You don't need to feel bad puring the coffee grounds literally anywhere outside because - as opposed to the vast majority of dish soaps and chemicals - coffee grounds actually help the soil and ecosystem thrive. You are rid of the coffee grounds and you will save a lot of money and space in the long run, provided you are already a coffee drinker, instead of purchasing, storing and worrying about petrol-based dish soap that can spill and harm ecosystems wherever it is spilled, used or poured in nature.

In a home I might still opt to use the coffee grounds for composting, but really, nothing would stop you from doing so even after washing the dishes with them. In multiple-usecase-Earthship fashion: The more uses for the same material, the better. Right?

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