It is part of the daily grind for many of us – making or buying coffee. Coffee is part of the Pacific Northwest lifestyle. Yet, like many aspects of our 21st century lifestyle in North America, coffee illustrates our collective insanity.
The story begins with us growing coffee in large tropical plantations. There are many issues around the environmental and economic sustainability of coffee plantations, and many of you are probably familiar with these.
Moving on, we get to the mass movement of coffee beans from the tropics to us in the Pacific Northwest. Along the way, there is also the processing of the raw beans into usable form. Then the beans are ground and water is run through them to percolate out as java.
Then what happens? Well, next we drink the coffee (hopefully in a reusable mug).
Is that all? No.
Left behind in the gazillion coffee filters used are literally tons of coffee grinds, the end product of the tons of coffee beans that were grown in the tropics and shipped to us.
So billions of small particles that can no longer be used to make coffee are discarded and forgotten about. Yet these grounds still contain energy from the tropical sun.
Certain coffee shops will offer the grounds back to customers as compost — ample grounds for consideration as we ramp up our gardens for spring. Plants do thrive on the nutrients available from coffee grounds, but there’s more to the end of the coffee story.
I have a student at Trinity Western who keeps a sharp eye on how humanity is missing the boat. Nathan Ginetz presented a senior paper this spring on how we as humans have the technology for a much greener future, but are failing to invest in such a future.
Nathan also conducted research to illustrate how the energy from coffee grounds could be recycled, adopting techniques utilized at a number of laboratories to show that it’s not hard to convert coffee grounds to biofuel.
A University of Nevada study estimated that the 16 billion pounds of coffee grounds produced each year could be converted into 340 million U.S. gallons of biodiesel.
Adding a sudden caffeine jolt into the fuel line would not cure our problems – the U.S. alone uses 40 billion gallons of diesel fuel annually for road transportation. Still, there are many other green energy sources.
Nathan has his eyes on microscopic green energy machines in particular – algae.
You may think Nathan’s crazy, but how sane is it to be stuck on the fossil fuel treadmill?
Someone needs to wake up and smell the coffee.
David Clements is a professor of biology and environmental studies at Trinity Western University.