WIRED 2015 is our annual two-day celebration of the innovators, inventors, artists and entrepreneurs who are reinventing our world. For more from the event, head over to our WIRED 2015 hub.
The UK drinks 70 million cups of coffee a year. That produces 500,000 tonnes of waste, and disposing of that costs £80m just within the coffee industry. But it also has a future; on an industrial estate in Cambridgeshire, that waste is being turned into advanced biofuels. "We've gone from me with a silly idea to that in just over two years," Arthur Kay, CEO and co-founder of bio-bean told WIRED 2015.
Kay came up with the idea of using coffee waste as fuel while studying architecture at The Bartlett, UCL. He was trying to design a closed-loop system to power a coffee shop and factory when he realised that the fuel he needed was right in front of his eyes. Two years later, a team of 25 people are working at bio-bean's 20,000 square foot factory.
The facility can process 50,000 tonnes per year, the equivalent of 100 cups of coffee per second. A single tonne of coffee waste, Kay explained, saves 6.8 tonnes in carbon emissions -- that the same as planting 90 tress or driving a London taxi from London to Beijing and back. Twice.
The waste coffee processed at Kay's factory is turned into two kinds of fuel: small biomass pellets and biodiesel. "We're getting ever closer to industrialising this not just in the UK but internationally as well," he said. Kay, who is also a fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, says that similar thinking will be essential as more and more people move from the country to the city.
"We're rapidly becoming an urban species, these cities act as massive amplifiers for the good and the bad." Around 80 percent of CO2 emissions are attributable to cities, Kay explained, arguing that the seemingly insurmountable problems we face as a planet will require urban solutions.
Almost 10 billion people will be alive by 2050, with up to 75 percent living in urban areas. To support that, we will be required to build 250 cities the size of New York City. "Each new person that comes onto the plant has the ability to create and innovate," he said. "The shape of the future and that of our planet depends on it".