Three young innovators were recently recognised in The Shell LiveWIRE Smarter Future awards.
We thought these were interesting ideas and hope you think the same. Here is the third and last of these innovators.
Revive Eco received its award for transforming coffee ground waste into fertilisers and biomass pellets that can be used as a low carbon heating source, winning £5,000 of equity-free funding.
Fergus Moore, its founder hopes to use this to help open a pilot coffee bio-refinery in Glasgow, but he says they have already benefited from the recognition that comes with winning an award.
“We create a range of environmentally beneficial products from used coffee grounds” he explained, “and we’ve developed a process that allows us to extract and purify high value volatiles from them. This process is far more efficient and cost-effective than competing processes. These volatiles have a range of uses in different industries like cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, food and drink and biodiesel. Following this, we are left with a carbon-rich residual material that still holds real value. Therefore, we can then blend this with some other nutrients and materials to create bio-fertiliser, ideal for acidic-soil loving plants”
“We are also developing a process that allows us to create a biomass pellet from this material that we plan to use to power our own process in the future”
The Revive Eco team collects used coffee grounds from coffee shops across Scotland; according to figures from the international Coffee Organisation, approximately 500,000 tonnes of coffee ground waste ends up in landfill every year in the UK. It has already partnered with a local coffee chain and a number of independent coffee stores in Glasgow, as well as successfully piloting its fertiliser in several gardens across the UK.
Taken from CIWM Journal June 2017 – The Journal for Waste & Resource Management professionals.
