As an architecture student at The Bartlett, UCL, I realised that coffee was being wasted everywhere. Coffee pours out of major urban centres: coffee shops, cafes, office blocks, museums, factories, airports. Anywhere people pass through, huge volumes of coffee grounds were being thrown away into landfill at an enormous economic and environmental cost. In fact, over 500,000 tonnes of waste coffee grounds are produced each year in the UK alone, with 200,000 tonnes from London.
Approaching the problem of coffee waste from an outside perspective, and using sustainability as the driving force behind my ideas, I set out to re-imagine this life cycle. The conceptual leap here was to simply turn this problem on its head. I started with the simple premise that there is no such thing as waste, simply resources in the wrong place.
Coffee waste is transformed into useful energy by bio-bean. Photo credit: bio-bean
In two years, bio-bean has become the first company in the world to industrialise turning waste coffee grounds into advanced biofuels. We have raised several million in finance, built the world’s first waste coffee recycling factory and a team of over twenty people.
bio-bean produces biomass pellets, used for heating buildings and in the near future coffee oil that can be refined into biodiesel, used in transport systems. bio-bean’s factory, the first in the world to recycle waste coffee grounds into advanced biofuels at an industrial scale, has the capacity to process 50,000 tonnes of waste coffee grounds each year. That’s one in ten cups of coffee drunk in the UK every year!
bio-bean is a small company interfacing with large corporations that dominate existing systems (such as the waste management industry and coffee supply chain). As the first company in the world to industrialise the process of recycling waste coffee grounds, the policy infrastructure also doesn’t exist to support bio-bean yet. By demonstrating the commercial and environmental advantages of our process has allowed bio-bean to successfully interface with partners at every scale. Most importantly, we have created a fantastic team of people, united under the vision of closing the loop on coffee waste.
The bio-bean process, find out more at bio-bean.com. Credit: bio-bean
bio-bean was set up in response to the challenges of the near future - pollution, transport, housing, food, water, energy, waste, overpopulation, physical and mental well-being equality and climate change - these are not global problems but uniquely urban ones. And if they are caused by cities it will fall to cities to solve them.
The shape of our future and that of our planet depends entirely on how we organise and evolve urban systems. Approaching tomorrow with a spirit of creativity, applying sustainable solutions to create opportunities - this will play a crucial role in all of our futures.
bio-bean is the first company to industrialise the process of recycling waste coffee grounds. Photo credit: bio-bean
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bio-bean is an award-winning clean technology company that recycles waste coffee grounds into advanced biofuels. To find out more visit: bio-bean.com
