I love coffee. I enjoy five or so cups every day. I’m addicted, basically. I become very cranky and get a headache if I don’t get my morning coffee by 8:00 a.m.
Americans love their coffee as well. About 100 million Americans consume coffee every day, and the average American drinks about 2.1 cups per day. About $4 billion per year is spent importing coffee to the United States every year.
All that coffee produces a lot of grounds, although I was unable to find a reliable statistic for that. The article linked in the next paragraph notes that London produces about 200,000 pounds of coffee grounds per year. The point is that all of those grounds must be good for something.
One answer is biofuel. As this article notes, there is indeed a process for turning coffee grounds into power. Bio-bean, a start-up based in London, uses a machine to extract the oil from the grounds. That oil is used to power buildings or buses. Bio-bean estimates that it saves the city of London about 53,000 barrels of oil a year.
Using coffee grounds as fuel has some advantages over other biofuels (such as Ethanol). It uses something that would otherwise be tossed in a landfill. Environmentalists argue that making Ethanol is a dirty process in itself. There is also the concern that growing corn drives up world food prices. What is not clear is how much dirty energy is used to extract the oil from the coffee grounds, so it’s not a perfect “green energy” solution.
The University of Cincinnati has also been experimenting with this technology, so maybe we will see some start-ups similar to Bio-bean here in the United States soon.
