More than 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed in the world each day. The UK alone consumes 95 million cups of coffee every day. That’s a lot of waste when it comes to the grounds. So, bio bean coffee logs is here!
Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of spent coffee ground waste, to be precise.
Of course, you can use them in your garden or in a fancy skin scrub, but what about all of those grounds which you can’t get your hands on?
Bio Bean is the world’s largest recycler of coffee grounds. Their coffee logs are briquettes made from recycled coffee grounds for use in wood-burners, stoves and open fires. Grounds which would otherwise end up in landfill and emit harmful greenhouse gasses.
You can buy these from a variety of hardware stores or online, which will save you some money
Bio Bean Coffee Logs
These bio bean coffee logs are solid biofuels which are both sustainable and heat efficient. They are able to provide heating on both home and industrial scales, and every single log contains the grounds from ~25 cups of coffee, which is pretty incredible.
They are able to make use of coffee’s high calorific value, providing a great planet-friendly alternative to conventional solid fuels. They also burn more efficiently than the kiln-dried wood you may currently use (20% hotter and longer than kiln-dried wood to be precise), which should save you some money in the long run as you’d have to buy fewer logs.
The grounds are collected from coffee shops and other businesses in the UK, and they come in fully recyclable packaging too.
You can also use them if you live in a no smoke zone
Do coffee logs smell like coffee?
There is a slight aroma of coffee when you open the bag originally, but they don’t give off any aromas when burning. If you have a particularly high sense of smell, you may detect a very faint scent but nothing off-putting.
This could be a good or bad thing depending on how much you love coffee, but on the plus side, it means you can stay warm without being overwhelmed by the scent.
How long do coffee logs burn for?
This is an average of 1 hour but can depend on your appliance and the airflow. With the Bio Bean logs, you get 16 in a bag, so this should give you a few weeks of heat depending on use.
How Do I Make My Own Coffee Logs?
While buying them is the easier option, and also the most reliable option (if anything goes slightly wrong with your crafting, you could have even more waste than you started out with), you can also give making your own a whirl.
You would need:
- One 9 X 5-inch baking pan
- Approximately 215g of candle wax
- 600g of molasses/black treacle
- 20 heaped tablespoons of dry coffee grounds (completely dried)
- Stirrer
Method:
- Preheat oven to 120C
- Combine the treacle and candle wax in the pan, ensuring the base is covered
- Heat for 30 minutes in the oven
- Once the wax has melted, add your dry coffee grounds to the mix, stirring through to combine
- The mix should become sludgy. You may need more or fewer coffee grounds to achieve this
- Cover with tin foil and press down to compact. Remove the foil and freeze for 1 hour
- Once cooled, remove the log from the pan
- Place into your fire with the shinier side facing upwards. You may need to use a firestarter to ignite it
This log will burn for around one hour, and gives off a much stronger scent of sugar and coffee than the shop-bought variations. It is a bit of work for one log, but if you have a real excess of coffee grounds, it is worth giving it a go!
