A biofuel made by blending of oil extracted from coffee waste with diesel is to be used to power public buses in London as from 20th, November 2017 as revealed by BBC.
Transport for London (TfL) is gradually moving to using biofuels to reduce transport emissions as technology firm bio-bean says it has produced enough coffee oil to power one bus for a year.
Biofuel made from waste products of cooking oil and tallow from meat processing has already been used in many of the capital’s 9,500 buses.
Though, it will be the first time a coffee-derived biofuel will be added to London’s public transport system.
The British Coffee Association stated that about 55 million cups of coffee are drunk in the UK per day, as such Londoners create 200,000 tonnes of coffee waste a year.
According to bio-bean the company takes the used grounds from coffee shops and instant coffee factories, and extracts oil from it in its factory which is then processed into a blended B20 biofuel that can be used to power buses without the need for modification.
As more than two billion passengers make their trips on buses each year in London, the firm believes it would take just over 2.55 million cups of coffee to create enough biofuel to run a London bus for a year once the oil has been blended with diesel. And six-thousand litres of coffee oil have been produced so far.
Bio-bean founder Arthur Kay is of the opinion that “the coffee-derived biofuel is a great example of what can be done when we start to re-imagine waste as an untapped resource”.
