Inside Tinker Coffee, O’Neill Sustainable Management and Policy major Skylar Hazlett is serving up more than drinks. She’s also educating customers about composting while helping make the company and community more sustainable.
“Adding more organic matter to the soil helps organisms have more to work with,” she explains.
In between making orders, Hazlett packs used coffee grounds into 5-pound bags.
“We don’t want to just throw away this valuable resource that could go on to provide nutritional value within the soil,” she says.
It was an idea first brewed up by her manager, who started providing bags of used grounds to customers, free of charge. Hazlett is now building on that idea, thanks to her capstone class at O’Neill.
A capstone course is a class all graduating students take prior to earning their degrees. While the courses vary by instructors and field of study, they often include students of various O’Neill majors. The students are required to complete a project that serves as a compilation of all the lessons and skills they’ve learned during their time with O’Neill.
“Sometimes in college, you’re so busy that you don’t get time to take a breath and think,” Hazlett says. “The capstone class gave me a time and a place to do that and to connect the dots between what I had learned and how to apply those skills to a project and even a career.”
For Hazlett, that meant expanding the coffee grounds program both inside the shop and beyond its walls. For current customers, she’s designing flyers to place around the shop to educate customers about composting.
“It’s about making sustainability approachable and understandable to the everyday person and communities,” she says.
Her flyers include information on what not to include in compost as well as how to balance so-called browns and greens. Brown material includes items rich in carbon, like dead leaves and branches. Green materials are those that contain a lot of nitrogen, such as grass clippings, vegetable, and fruit waste—and even those coffee grounds from Tinker. Together, the combination provides the food and fuel necessary for proper decomposition.
“You need the right balance of browns and greens for a perfect compost,” Hazlett explains. “That balance makes sure organisms like worms and other little critters can work with the materials and actually create your compost.”
The second part of her plan involves creating partnerships within the community. She started with nearby Herron High School. In March 2024, Tinker Coffee began sending them coffee grounds to use for their gardening club. Hazlett hopes to develop a similar partnership with Riverside High School. She’s also looking to expand education and distribution efforts to the coffee shop’s newest location.
“This isn’t a crazy project,” she says. “But I think it just proves how accessible sustainability can really be. There are very easy things we can all do to help create more sustainable communities.”
That’s where Hazlett sees herself working in the future, even if she doesn’t yet know exactly how that will play out. She wants to help ensure people have access to the proper resources—whether that be fresh food, parks, or simply knowing the right people to contact about sustainability efforts within the local government.
“That’s the cool thing about sustainability: it’s really broad,” she explains. “It’s exciting to think about all the possibilities that could exist within sustainability to make our communities better places for everyone.”
