Developing the specification of dried spent coffee grounds as a sustainable material for use in a range of industries

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Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK

£747,055

Sept. 30, 2020

June 30, 2021

bio-bean is the world's largest spent coffee grounds (SCG) recycling company, currently reprocessing ~7,000 tonnes of SCG per annum into solid biofuels. The company has recently launched a natural flavour product extracted from food grade SCG. SCG is a high-volume waste problem in the order of over 500,000 tonnes in the UK alone, the disposal of which has a serious environmental impact.

The bio-bean factory is unique in deploying its technology, in particular its drying technology, on an industrial scale to transform what was once a waste into a useful, sustainable material for a range of end products and uses. After considerable recent investment, the bio-bean factory now has the capacity to reliably reprocess in excess of 16,000t of SCG per annum.

At present the SCG once dried is mixed with other bio-based residues and manufactured into the solid biofuels that bio-bean currently sells as coffee pellets and Coffee Logs.

In the last 12 months bio-bean has been approached by various businesses wishing to use dried SCG in a wide range of potential large-scale applications. Each of these uses would see SCG, a biomaterial formerly considered a waste, replace a virgin material that must be specifically produced or extracted for these applications.

The value of SCG/t when used in any one of these applications exceeds its value when used as a solid biofuel which makes developing the potential of SCG to be used in these applications an attractive commercial opportunity.

However, in order for SCG to be used consistently and at the potential scale for which market demand exists it needs to be dried to a far more specific and narrower product specification than that which the SCG for solid biofuel purposes meets and the particle size of the grounds reduced.

This project therefore seeks to develop bio-bean's SCG drying capability so that it can dry its SCG to the required product specification and to do this consistently, taking into account the wide range of feedstock characteristics which arise as a result of the SCG feedstock being a waste. Further the project will research, test and develop a scaled method to reduce the particle size of the dried SCG.