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If The Shoe Fits: Ya Gotta Love Arthur Kay And Bio-bean

by Miki Saxon

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

5726760809_bf0bf0f558_mEntrepreneurs are great, although I have to admit that the entitled, connected, mostly white, bros of Silicon Valley aren’t among the ones I like and respect.

And no matter how large the investment, high the valuation or great the returns, coming up with a new way to find a date/restaurant/cheap ticket for whatever or share your life (in order to believe you have one) I don’t find particularly impressive.

But I love those who solve real problems, whether for enterprise, healthcare, agriculture, and, especially, for our poor, beleaguered planet.

So I got a real kick out of seeing what  Arthur Kay, the UK founder of Bio-bean, is doing.

Most of the products his company makes from used coffee grounds are industrial, but they do have a consumer product called Coffee Logs (sadly not available in the US — yet).

Each carbon neutral Coffee Log is made from the grounds of 25 cups of coffee and contains about 20% more energy than wood – meaning it burns hotter and for longer than wood.

Now Bio-bean has teamed with Shell to produce biofuel.

The startup collects used coffee grounds from cafes, restaurants and factories, and transports them to its recycling facility. There, the grounds are dried before coffee oil is extracted.

The coffee oil is then blended with other fuels to create B20 biofuel, which can be used in diesel buses without modification.

Without modification, that’s huge and undercuts the biggest reason governments use to avoid greener options — cost of conversion.

And that doesn’t even factor in the benefits from not sending all those coffee grounds to the landfill.

The UK produces 500,000 metric tons of coffee grounds each year, but that pales in comparison to what is left in the US after making 400 million cups of coffee every single day.

Kay needs to bring his concept to the US—it would make quite a difference.

Image credit: HikingArtist and bio-bean

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