Coffee is consumed in massive amounts around the world. The average Swede drinks 8.2 kilos of coffee per year. The Netherlands is even more coffee crazy as they drink 8.4 kilos of coffee per person and year. The Dutch company Caffe Inc has addressed an environmental issue related to coffee drinking.
Only one percent of the coffee bean ends in the coffee cup; the rest stays in the filter. In the Netherlands, 250,000 tonnes of coffee grounds are thrown away every year. All this coffee's cultivation, roasting, and transport results in 8.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere every year.
Caffe Inc's business concept is to reuse the coffee grounds. They collect coffee grounds from cafés, restaurants, and companies and convert them into other products. They produce, for example, coffee oil used in skincare products, ink for printers, dyes for the clothing industry, and building materials.
So far, Caffe Inc has worked on a slightly smaller scale, but now they will build a new factory that will take care of coffee grounds that correspond with the amount of carbon dioxide that 75,000 trees can absorb each year.