coffee cups

Latté, espresso, flat-white, 4-star?

There appears to be practically nothing organic which couldn’t, in theory, be turned into biofuels. At first glance, however, the University of Bath’s suggestion that coffee might be a substitute for petrol is a little counter-intuitive.

Sure, you have the advantage that it reduces harmful emissions, but isn’t that outweighed by the disadvantage that coffee is one of the few liquids on the planet even more expensive than petrol? The price of coffee on the commodities market is nearly twice what it was last year, and its price is every bit as volatile as oil; half of what it was at the beginning of 2011, for example.

But in any case, it’s always going to be pricier than vegetable oil, or grains. And the fact that you can do something doesn’t mean it’s economical to do it. After all, you could probably convert a car to run on single malt whisky, or first growth clarets, but nobody’s queuing up to do that.

The difference is that those two commodities don’t leave anything (other than the bottle) behind at the point of consumption. All the residual organic material is generated at the time it’s manufactured – and in both those cases, that’s many years before the point at which it’s consumed. But when you make coffee, the waste material is there as soon as you’ve filled the cup; and it’s the grounds which Bath’s study suggests could be used as biofuel.

You may think this still isn’t an economically viable solution. Anyone who drinks enough coffee to produce a useful amount to run a car is going to be so wired they’d never be safe to drive the thing.

There’s an obvious exception, though. What if you already have large supplies of used coffee grounds as an inevitable part of your daily output? Well, then, pretty obviously, you are running a coffee shop or similar outlet – or you’re in the final stages of writing a novel. If you happen to be Starbucks or Costa or Caffè Nero, coffee biofuel wouldn’t be a ludicrously expensive and wasteful way of fueling your vehicles, as it would for anyone else, but might – depending on the conversion costs – even give you substantial savings.

It’s easy to think of other businesses, and biofuels, which might work in a similarly symbiotic way; fast food restaurants and vegetable oil, say, or farmers using methane from the manure generated by their livestock.

For the average consumer, recycling may not offer much other than the virtuous glow of doing your bit for the environment, while saving you a few quid on storage jars, compost or kindling.

But for companies, the economies of scale could be genuinely enormous. Coca-Cola, for example, is responsible for producing 300,000 tons of aluminium in used cans every year in the USA alone. To put that into perspective, it’s more than 17% of all the aluminium produced in the US annually.

Of course, that’s a by-product which doesn’t, at the moment, usually end up in the company’s possession. But the net result of corporations getting bigger and bigger, while commodities and fuel get more and more expensive, is bound to be that such secondary uses – even those as daft-sounding as running vehicles on coffee – will become not only economically viable, but crucial to the bottom line.

 

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