What will you deal with coffee grounds? Turning it into fossil fuels is an option now! The UK consumes 70 million cups each day, producing 500,000T of waste coffee grounds each year. A company, bio-bean collects waste coffee grounds from coffee shops, office blocks, transport hubs and coffee factories, and recycles them into advanced biofuels.
Coffee recycling can reduce waste disposal costs for businesses. This is because the costs for waste coffee collection are usually offset by a reduction in the costs of disposing of other waste streams.
Heavy, wet coffee grounds often end up in general waste, which usually goes to landfill. Removing heavy waste coffee grounds from your waste stream can therefore generate significant savings for your business. Additionally, waste management companies can charge for contaminated dry mixed recycling, so segregating your waste coffee grounds reduces this risk – especially as coffee is a key culprit for contaminating other waste streams.
Recycling waste coffee grounds also benefits the environment by diverting this waste from other means of disposal – typically landfill, anaerobic digestion (AD), or incineration. Landfill site, which is where most waste coffee grounds end up, account for 22% of the UK’s methane emissions, as a result of the decomposition of organic material. Methane is a greenhouse gas 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide, which indicates that sending waste coffee grounds to bio-bean produces 60% less CO2 emissions than sending them to landfill.
While incinerating waste coffee grounds is better than sending them to landfill, it is still not the best use of this resource. From a life-cycle perspective, recycling waste has been shown to conserve on average 3-5 times more energy than that generated from incineration.
Waste coffee grounds are often combined with food waste and sent for AD. But, the gritty nature makes them difficult to handle and their chemical composition can be toxic to the microbes inside the digesters. This means waste coffee grounds can actually inhibit the rate of bio-methane production in AD plants. This creates carbon-neutral, advanced biofuels from waste coffee grounds, displacing fossil fuels.
Source: www.bio-bean.com