Coffee... fuelling you...and your car!

Does it get any better? Here we have a drink that switches on your day , keeps you smiling when the idiot called The Boss is mucking around in your territory, and gets you home before the “on” lamp in your brain, flickers and fades for the night. Well yes it could get better… you could buy a nice coffee machine to make it better; you could be given a years supply of the best Blue Mountain… or the stuff that has been passed through the gut of some rare animal….but that’s missing the point.

It does get better, and from an environmental perspective too. What if coffee could not only fuel you…but your car as well? What if you could use the grounds from your coffee machine waste container to make biodiesel? Well you can.

Consider the fact that 7 billion kilograms of coffee are grown each year, and that used coffee grounds have an oil content of between 11 and 20 percent. Then consider that a major constraint to wider production of biodiesel is that there is a lack of low cost, high quality oil containing feedstock. Soyabeans and sunflower seeds, the traditional source of oil for biodiesel, are not only expensive but are used for human consumption – not much point in having cheap fuel and expensive food!

Now three US researchers have found that spent grounds from coffee machines, which are usually just thrown out or used as compost, can potentially add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the world's fuel supply. And if you thought that the high antioxidant content of coffee was a myth, then change your mind as the scientists developed a more stable fuel than conventional biodiesel, because of coffee’s high antioxidant content.

Best of all, the fuel actually smells like coffee! Now I hate going to fill up, but with the sweet smell of coffee in the air, I might see more people outside the Wild Bean Café than in it!