Accelerated coffee pulp composting

Coffee is one of the most important agroindustrial exporting products in tropical countries. In Mexico coffee is the foremost exported product and it provides the greatest foreign income after oil. Unfortunately, the ‘humid’or ‘wet’ process for transforming the complete fruit into a clean seed free of its natural envelope, ready for exportation, currently utilises a very high volume of water (4–7 L water per kilogram of complete fruit), and it represents one of the major sources of pollution in the coffee producing regions. In the case of the State of Veracruz, facing the Gulf of Mexico, there are currently approx. 447 humid coffee processing units, and from the production data for 1992–93 it can be estimated that an approximate annual volume of residual water of 9.46 x 106m3 has been discharged without treatment to the 43 water bodies, including major basins, together with residual solids of approx. 156000 ton [1].