When we make food, there is bound to be waste, such as the skins of fruits that are inedible, the roots of plants that we discard, tea leaves that we throw away after one use, and so on. There have been ways to try and find uses for such wastes, such as turning them into fertilizers that we can use back on plants.
However it seems that over in the UK, it looks like the city of London will be putting its coffee drinking habits to a greener use, by powering buses with coffee grounds. This is thanks to a collaboration between Bio-Bean, Shell, and Argent Energy, where London’s buses will be filled with a B20 biofuel created by blending oil extracted from coffee waste and diesel.
The best part of this initiative is that buses will not have to be modified, which means that there doesn’t need to be additional money spent on retrofitting buses with new hardware, and since cafes and coffee producers already use the beans, there doesn’t need to be any change on their part either.
Unfortunately it does seem like it could be a slow effort as only enough fuel has been generated to power a single bus for one year, but as Engadget notes, with 20 million cups of coffee drank per day in London, perhaps production of the fuel could ramp up pretty quickly in no time.