London has been stifling with red double-deckers shrouding the streets with exhaust fumes. To curb toxic fuels and prevent the capital from further choking on heavy pollution, transport companies have started to look for new sources of energy for the buses.
The latest proposal is to partner with bio-bean, a company specialised in creating clean fuel from coffee waste. By recycling coffee grounds collected across the United Kingdom, the company has presented the world’s first coffee-derived biodiesel.
Powering one bus for a year with biofuel from coffee waste
Mandated by the city authorities, bio-bean, partnering with Royal Dutch Shell and fuel blender Argent Energy, presented its biofuel made from coffee grounds in November 2017.
The project is supported by Shell’s #makethefuture initiative but the revolutionary coffee-derived biofuel is not yet available commercially. The company evaluated that the first batch of this blend, that is, 6,000 litres, would be enough to power one bus for a complete year. London’s buses use 240 million litres of diesel annually, according to official statistics from 2015.
Shifting towards coffee-derived biodiesel will make London’s bus fleet forge a considerable and sustainable contribution to future transport systems. The most populous city of the UK, London is notorious for its alarmingly poor quality of air, directly resulting in thousands of deaths every year, as stated the Mayor in October 2017. This shift will definitely serve as an example to other dense cities collapsing under concentrations of harmful exhaust fumes.
Even if coffee-based oil releases a very strong smell of coffee, once processed, distilled, and mixed with mineral diesel, the aroma will no longer be present, as pinpointed bio-bean. So, there is no chance of actually strolling in the city with streets permeated with coffee notes.
Reimagining waste as an untapped source
Londoners consume about two to three cups of coffee per day, resulting in approximately 200,000 tonnes of used grounds. Wet heavy coffee grounds usually end up in general waste in landfills. To reimagine waste, bio-bean work with waste management companies to collect coffee waste process it into oil in its own factory.
Coffee grounds are collected at various scales, be it at an independent cafe, a major coffee chain, universities, property groups or instant coffee factories. Bio-bean provides its waste management partners everything necessary to collect the waste such as caddies, refuse sacks, bins and even vehicles. The goal behind partnering with waste management companies was to minimise waste mileage and take advantage of the existing waste management infrastructure.
Recycling coffee equally proves to be beneficial to businesses. Indeed, a landfill tax is imposed on landfill site operators in the UK. Obviously, the latter pass this cost on to their clients by charging higher collection fees on their turn. Consequently, separating coffee waste from general waste and sending it for recycling can result in significant savings for businesses.
Coffee recycling furthermore has its load of environmental benefits. By recycling coffee grounds, bio-bean generates carbon-neutral, advanced biofuels that can replace harmful fossil fuels. Recycling coffee waste also dramatically reduces the quantity of organic material decomposing in landfill sites which represent 22% of methane emissions in the UK. Coffee recycling can thus dramatically reduce CO2 emissions. The gritty nature of coffee grounds equally makes them difficult to handle when sent for Anaerobic Digestion (AD). This is one of the principal reasons that equally urged Biogen, a leading AD operator in the UK, to divert its coffee waste towards bio-bean in Cambridgeshire.
Expanding a network of partners for coffee recycling in the UK
The initiative of bio-bean to recycle coffee waste to produce biofuel is appealing to various businesses and organisations that are eco-conscious. Costa Coffee, for instance, began its partnership with the company in 2016 and every year, about 3,000 tonnes of coffee grounds are collected from Costa sites across the UK. By doing so, Costa Coffee prevents about 360 tonnes of CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere annually. This figure can be likened to planting a forest having the size of 95 football pitches. Kahaila Cafe is another small coffee shop in London that partners with bio-bean since 2016, mostly to promote an ethically-minded approach to business. For the first year, the shop filled more than 400 bin bags equivalent to two tonnes of waste coffee grounds. The company has seen its costs on waste disposal as well as carbon footprint diminish.
One of the major partners of bio-bean is Network Rail. As thousands of passengers transit through train stations daily, hundreds of tonnes of coffee waste is produced yearly. Network Rail was previously paying waste management companies to dispose of this waste in landfills. In 2015, it decided to partner with bio-bean to let the latter collect waste coffee in all coffee shops and retail sites in six of the busiest train stations in London. Over 10 million of coffee cups with 868 tonnes of coffee waste have been collected and recycled. This resulted in £34,000 savings in waste disposal costs.
Catering companies like Vacherin also launched itself into this revolution by vowing to ensure to send zero waste to landfills. Its strategy is to see to it that every type of waste ends up in the most sustainable manner. For the year 2016/17, approximately 250,000 cups of coffee were recycled, positioning the company as one of the most sustainable catering businesses in the UK. The teahouse and glasshouse restaurant Petersham Nurseries has equally joined the endeavour. Producing one and a half tonnes of coffee waste annually, they decided to opt for recycling them. Bio-bean went a step further by recycling them into Coffee Logs, a high-performance winter fuel that burns longer and hotter than wood. Organisations such as Eversheds Sutherland also took the initiative to reduce its waste collection costs and help the environment by recycling its coffee waste. As a matter of fact, the large law firm in London creates approximately 500kg of waste coffee grounds as its 800 employees consume about 12,500 cups of coffee monthly.
Leslie Carr
