Of all the terrible trends at the intersection of coffee and tech – there are so many of them, from throwing away VC money to unnecessary artificial intelligence to blaming baristas when companies turn to automation to save a few bucks – the one I hate the most is the false claim that growing coffee causes deforestation.
Technically, this is true. There are people cutting down rainforests to plant coffee trees, which is certainly a problem. And these cases are used to attack coffee farmers in general, despite the fact that many of them work in a way that benefits the environment. And people making these sweeping statements generally do so just to advertise their coffee alternatives (some of them even include a half-coffee, half-no-coffee blend, and good luck figuring out the mental gymnastics it took to denigrate coffee farmers). In reality, it doesn’t matter what the crop yields are for people who want to rip up the rainforest for profit. It could be coffee, avocado, cocoa or cattle farming. If it weren’t for coffee, it would be something else.
So yes, coffee has been used to deforest areas by bad actors. But! BUT! A novel study has found that coffee can also be used to capture greenhouse gases and other harmful industrial emissions.
As reported BioengineerScientists at the University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates have developed a novel process that uses coffee grounds and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic to capture CO.2 emissions. Thanks to a patented process, coffee grounds and PET are co-pyrolysed, a process in which they are subjected to a temperature of 600°C “in the presence of potassium hydroxide”.
In this way, activated carbon is created, whose enormous surface area and porous structure make it very effective in removing CO2 absorption before the particles reach the ozone layer.
The novel process offers significant environmental benefits beyond carbon capture. Chief among them is that it relies on coffee grounds and PET, two things that routinely end up in landfills, turning them from negative to positive. The process is also inexpensive and uses an “environmentally cordial activation temperature” for copyrolysis.
The produced green activated carbon has the potential for a wide variety of industrial applications, including drinking water filtration, sewage systems, gas purification and air purification, such as “cleaning exhaust gases from waste incineration and controlling emissions from burning fossil fuels.”
So while coffee may be a tool for deforestation and all the harmful ecological consequences that come with it, thanks to a novel process it can also be used to counteract this phenomenon. And let’s take a look at how all the date pits or whatever are used to make non-coffee!
