How your morning buzz may soon power your bus
How one company is changing the way you think of your morning coffee
How one company is changing the way you think of your morning coffee
Bio-bean has announced that one day that triple, venti, half-sweet, non-fat, caramel macchiato, you just ordered from your favourite coffee store could power London busses.
The UK Government ministers are back in the high court later this week to defend their current plans on tackling air pollution. Could recycling coffee grounds save the capitals air pollution issue? One company thinks that they have solved the problem: Bio-bean has teamed up with Royal Dutch Shell under its #makethefuture initiative, and unveiled the world’s first coffee derived biodiesel.
London’s dangerous air pollution lead mayor Sadiq Khan to trigger an emergency air quality alert in September 2017. Warning residents who have lung or heart problems being advised to reduce exercise outside. This lead Professor Johnathan Grigg from Doctors Against Diesel telling The Guardian that: “Khan needs to do more to tackle the problem and that vulnerable people shouldn’t have to restrict their activities to stay safe”. Time to experiment with new ideas could be the way forward for busses on one of the most iconic and busy bus networks in the world. According to Bio-bean, recycling coffee grounds has many environmental benefits, by replacing harmful fossil fuels with biofuels.
This idea came from Arthur Kay, company CEO of Bio-bean when he was a student in 2013. When starting his company, Arthur was determined to look at the process of collecting and using coffee grounds, which he saw as having a high-energy potential. Fast-forward to 2015 a year which saw rapid growth thanks to the help of investment bio-bean launches nationwide collection services, and opened a waste coffee recycling factory. In 2016, the company launched its first consumer product, coffee logs for use in the home. Already companies have seen potential such as Costa Coffee and Network Rail who have begun recycling their coffee through Bio-bean with about 3,000 tons of coffee grounds being collected from Costa sites across the UK. This alone prevents about 360 tonnes of CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere annually. Alongside this Network Rail has saved £34,000 in waste disposal costs. Recycling coffee grounds seems to have already set the wheels in motion.
Bio-bean’s partner Shell stated that “Coffee makes up a component of the bio-fuel used in selected London buses today. But as a pure-blend, the 6,000L of coffee oil provided in this project by Bio-bean would be enough to help power a bus for a year. London produces enough waste coffee grounds to create a pure-blend B20 biofuel — made from coffee oil and mineral diesel — on a scale large enough to help fuel around a third of the London bus network.”
Bio-bean aims to work with waste management companies to collect coffee grounds, then process it into oil in its factory.
Hopefully, technology can help the capital overcome this challenge with many new ideas launching to combat the problem, another idea led by a company called Airlabs is bus stops that filter out 97 per cent of nitrogen-dioxide from the air, meaning commuters can breathe cleaner air while waiting to get to work. The company has already installed three bus stops in central London with the aim to tackle this problem.
