Innovation and start-ups: Used Coffee Grounds Turned Into A Renewable Energy Source

Coffee is one of the globe’s largest agricultural commodities, with about 8bn kilograms (more than 16bn lbs) grown annually worldwide. That’s a lot of coffee – and a lot of leftover coffee grounds, most of which ends up in landfills or, in a best-case scenario, as a soil conditioner in someone’s garden.

Soluble coffee has been reported as a richsource of antioxidants, the consumption of which may prevent diseases caused by oxidative damage.Through a little bit of research the founder of Bio-Bean, Arthur Kay ,taught that coffee has a higher caloric value than wood.  figured out how to compress the grounds into bio-fuel pellets.

Credit :@LiveWIRE Winner Photography, Arthur Kay, UK, 2014

As it has been reported on the Guardian, companies such as Starbucks and Nestle, for example, are already putting used coffee grounds to work, while researchers believe that oil from coffee grounds could end up contributing tens of millions of liters of biodiesel to the global fuel supply.

UK-based clean tech company bio-bean has industrialized the process of turning used coffee grounds into sustainable biofuels and biochemicals. Bio-bean works within the existing energy and waste infrastructure to develop products and solutions that displace conventional fuels and chemicals.

The Telegraph reports that Bio-Bean has contracts to collect used coffee grounds from cafes, coffee factories, and airports, all of whom are saving a pretty penny in disposal fees (£154 per ton, around $225). Before being turned into biofuel, the coffee refuse is stripped of the oils in order to keep the bricks from smelling like coffee when burned. “Some people think this is a shame but others don’t want their home to smell like Starbucks,” Kay states.

Bio-Bean, now three year old company,  reprocesses about 10% of all the coffee grounds in the UK — about 50,000 tons — into pellets every year. That’s enough to heat about 15,000 homes according to its founder. The company produces biomass pellets and recently introduced Coffee Logs, carbon neutral biomass briquettes that can fuel homes and appliances, such as wood-fire stoves and BBQs. It has also undertaken extensive research and development into the commercial application of biodiesel from waste coffee grounds.

Bio-bean sells its carbon-neutral clean fuel to local businesses and aims to eventually help power the same coffee shops that supplied the grounds.

In Joure, in the Netherlands, Veolia and Douwe Egberts Master Blenders have developed a solution for reusing coffee grounds to produce steam, and thus reduce the coffee company’s consumption of natural gas.

Veolia engineers set out to meet this challenge by developing a combustion system unlike any other in the world, in which the spent coffee grounds from the production process are burned to generate the steam needed to operate the plant. The system has enabled the plant to reduce its CO2 emissions by 70%.

Sources: Bio-bean,the Guardian, Telegraph UK.

Used coffee grounds can clean contaminated water https://t.co/imWxzdUje5 pic.twitter.com/qBNjaabcdE

— Popular Science (@PopSci) 2 octobre 2016

#TopTip, a cotton swab of your leftover #coffee grounds can be used as a #quickfix for scratches in your wooden furniture…☕️ pic.twitter.com/Hrps2G31TW

— Coffee Planet (@MyCoffeePlanet) 26 septembre 2016

Read More:

• Spent Coffee Grounds as a Renewable Source of Bioactive Compounds

• Oil extracted from spent coffee grounds as a renewable source for fatty acid methyl ester manufacturing

• #BIOFUELS FROM COFFEE GROUNDS COULD HELP TO POWER LONDON( #BIODIESEL #ENERGY)

Featured Image Credit: @Wikipedia

credit:@ Pixabay

Français:

Grâce à une technologie proche de celle qui permet aux industriels du sucre de produire du biocarburant, Bio-Bean est capable de transformer les restes de café en un produit capable de propulser les voitures équipées de moteurs adaptés. Mais la production de ce nouveau carburant laisse à son tour des déchets « solides », pour lesquels notre entreprise britannique a également une solution : compactés, ils sont transformés en granulés pour le chauffage.

Pour l’instant, la société basée à Londres centre son activité sur la capitale anglaise et se permet même le luxe de produire local, et donc de limiter les émissions de CO2 de son activité.

Pour cela, il a fixé aux habitants et aux industriels locaux des objectifs ambitieux en terme de déchets (70% d’entre eux devront être réutilisés, recyclés ou compostés d’ici 2020) et d’émissions de CO2 (60% d’émissions en moins d’ici 2025).