Costa and UCL Start-Up Transform Coffee Waste into Renewable Fuel

Business News/Analysis, Feedstocks, Not Agriculture, Sustainability, UK (United Kingdom)

December 22, 2016

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(University College London) UCL start-up bio-bean is turning more than 3,000 tonnes of waste coffee grounds into low-carbon fuel in a new partnership with coffee giant Costa.

Waste grounds from more than 850 Costa stores are being transformed into biomass pellets and so-called ‘coffee logs’ for wood-burning stoves by bio-bean, which operates the world’s first coffee waste recycling factory.

“From our perspective at bio-bean we have been keen from the outset to work at scale and work nationally,” founder and chief executive Arthur Kay told BusinessGreen.”

The partnership with Costa caps a highly successful year for bio-bean, which was co-founded by Arthur Kay (BSc Architecture 2013) while a student at UCL. Earlier this year the company won the Virgin Media Business Voom 2016 competition, which has a prize fund of £1m. The company’s Coffee Logs, a carbon neutral consumer product that replaces coal and wood, were launched in October, and are available on Amazon.

‘We’re delighted to see bio-bean going from strength-to-strength since starting at UCL,’ said Charlotte Croffie, Director of Entrepreneurship, UCL Innovation and Enterprise. ‘It’s an encouraging testament to the quality of support that UCL provides to our entrepreneurial students.’

In 2013, bio-bean won a UCL Bright Ideas Award, designed to help bridge the financial gap that many companies find themselves in when they search for their first funding. In addition to receiving start-up funding, bio-bean also received multiple one-to-one advisory and training sessions from UCL staff. READ MORE and MORE (Business Green)

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