Coffee powers plant
Sumitomo Metal Industries, a steel works company, is using coffee grounds as a biomass fuel to power its Kashima plant in Japan.
Currently the biomass fuel generated from coffee only equates to 1% of the total amount of fuel used within the plant but the company hopes to increase this number over time.
For the first year of coffee biomass generation Sumitomo plans to purchase 12,000 coffee grounds, which are then mixed with coal to produce 470MW of electricity at the plant, which is enough to power around 400,000 houses.
Even though 99% of the mixture is made up of coal, using coffee still reduces carbon emissions expelled from the plant, and Sumitomo predicts it will cut emissions by 7,000 tonnes this year alone.