Converting Coffee Waste to Energy
With oil prices hitting record highs, power, food, transportation and heating cost have all experienced an increase in prices making the search for alternative energy all the more important. There is one coffee factory in the Philippines that uses its energy from spent coffee grounds.
Nescafe Philippines with its plant in Cagayan de Oro factory’s atmospheric fluidized bed boiler (AFBB) is a state of the art technology that burns and recycles spent coffee grounds into bunker fuel, which the factory uses for its daily operations. Spent coffee grounds are the remains of ground roasted coffee after extraction.
Aside from helping the environment by burning less fuel, the AFBB system also cuts power costs dramatically. By using biomass or the spent coffee grounds as substitute for bunker fuel, Nestle prevents emission of air pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, which are natural by-products arising from the combustion of fossil fuels.
The whole course of recycling the spent coffee grounds starts after green coffee beans are roasted; then ground roasted coffee is processed with hot water using percolation batteries or extraction cells to produce the coffee extract. While the coffee extract undergoes spray drying to produce the coffee that we all love, the spent coffee grounds are then sent to the disposal system to be used as fuel. The heat produced from this process is then used to produce the steam requirements of the factory thereby producing cleaner power.
