Waste Full Of Energy

Question: what connects cooking oil, tallow, and coffee?  Answer: they will all soon be used to power London buses.  While cooking oil and tallow are already established sources of biofuel which keeps many of London’s 9,500 buses running, waste coffee grounds are set to join in on the act after it was announced that they are to be added to the capital’s public transport fuel supply.  It is largely down to the sterling efforts of technology firm bio-bean which has managed to extract six thousand litres of oil from grounds collected from coffee shops and instant coffee factories.  When blended with diesel, this is enough to power a bus for a year.  As for how many cups of coffee it takes to produce 6,000 litres of coffee oil, according to bio-bean around 2.55 million.  While that may seem a lot it is just a small drop in the coffee ocean when one considers an incredible 200,000 tonnes of coffee waste are generated by Londoners each year. “It’s a great example of what can be done when we start to reimagine waste as an untapped resource,” bio-bean founder Arthur Kay said.  Code for: “wake up and smell the coffee!”