LONDON FIRM TURNS WASTE COFFEE GROUNDS INTO BIOFUELS

摘要

Bio-bean, a new London-based company, has announced that it plans to recycle waste coffee grounds and convert them into biofuels. In an interview with the Guardian, founder Arthur Kay said he came up with the idea when he was studying architecture at UCL in 2012. Kay said he discovered that London produced 200,000 tonnes of coffee waste per year and that coffee had oil content in it. The technology Bio-bean uses is straightforward. Coffee grounds are dried, a patented biochemical process extracts oil and the remaining material is then turned into biomass pellets used to be burned in boilers. By weight it is about 15-20% oil, while the remaining 80-85% is turned into biomass pellets. The solvent that is evaporated in a biochemical process called "hexane extraction" is also 99.9% recyclable, he added.