Latest / The Manufacturing Podcast with Fexingo: Factories, Supply Chains, and Industrial Business / How a Belgian Factory Turns Coffee Grounds into Biofuel
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, how many cups of coffee do you think the average office worker in Brussels goes through in a year? Luna: I'd guess maybe two hundred? That's roughly one per working day. Lucas: Close. Actually, the average is around 2.4 cups per day in Belgium, which puts it closer to six hundred cups a year per person. Now multiply that by the entire city, and you get something like a hundred and fifty million kilograms of wet coffee grounds annually — just from Brussels. Luna: That's a lot of sludge. And most of it ends up in landfill or incineration, right? Lucas: Exactly. But there's a factory about thirty kilometers east of Brussels, in a town called heist op den berg, that's turning those grounds into biofuel. I visited last month. The facility is run by a company called 'Coffee Cycle', and they process about fifteen tons of used coffee grounds every day. Luna: Fifteen tons a day? That's impressive — where does it all come from? Lucas: They collect from over eight hundred businesses — mostly offices, hotels, and coffee shops. They also partner with local municipalities that separate coffee waste from household compost. The grounds arrive in big plastic bags, still wet, smelling like a giant espresso. Luna: So the first step has to be drying them, I assume? Lucas: Right. They spread the grounds on a heated floor for about twenty-four hours, reducing moisture from around sixty percent down to ten percent. Then they run the dried grounds through a mechanical press to extract the oil — coffee beans are about fifteen percent oil by weight. That oil is then converted into biodiesel through a process called transesterification, same as what you'd do with vegetable oil. Luna: And the leftover solid? The defatted grounds? Lucas: That becomes biomass pellets for industrial heating. Nothing goes to waste. They claim a net energy gain — the biodiesel itself contains more energy than the process consumes — and the carbon footprint is about eighty percent lower than conventional diesel, because the CO2 released when burning was already pulled from the atmosphere by the coffee plants. Luna: It sounds almost too neat. Are there any downsides? Contaminants from the grounds, or the cost? Lucas: The biggest challenge is collection logistics. Coffee grounds are heavy and wet, so transport costs are high per unit of energy. Coffee Cycle uses electric trucks for local collections to keep emissions low, but that's not cheap. Also, the biodiesel they produce is blended at a five percent ratio with regular diesel, because the coffee oil's fatty acid profile makes it prone to gelling in cold weather. So it's not a direct replacement, but it's a meaningful drop-in blend. Luna: I read that a similar project in London struggled with contamination — plastic cups, stirrers, that sort of thing — and ended up having to hand-sort. How does Coffee Cycle handle that? Lucas: They require clients to use biodegradable bags and to remove any non-organic material. They also run a magnetic separator and an optical sorter before the drying step. It adds cost, but they say it's manageable because the volume is consistent. The real economics depend on the price of diesel. Right now, with oil around eighty dollars a barrel, their biodiesel is competitive with fossil diesel before subsidies. Luna: If today's episode moved your thinking forward in some small way, the easiest way to support the show is to buy me a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Just a simple link — no pressure. Lucas: Yeah, that's exactly right. It helps us keep the podcast ad-free and focused on stories like this one. Luna: So, back to the factory — what's the scale of their operation? Are they expanding? Lucas: Coffee Cycle currently produces about five hundred thousand liters of biodiesel per year. That's enough to fuel around fifty garbage trucks annually. They're planning to double capacity by next year by adding a second drying line. And they've started a pilot with a large coffee roaster to take their green bean husks — that's the outer skin that comes off during roasting — as an additional feedstock. Luna: That's a smart synergy. Roasters usually pay to have that husk hauled away, right? Lucas: Exactly. So Coffee Cycle gets a free input, and the roaster reduces waste costs. It's a textbook circular economy deal. The husks are drier than spent grounds, so the energy cost for drying is lower, which improves the overall energy balance. Luna: What's the regulatory environment like in Belgium? Are there mandates or subsidies that make this viable? Lucas: Belgium has a renewable energy directive that requires a certain percentage of transport fuel to come from waste-based sources. Coffee biodiesel qualifies, so there's a certificate trading system that adds about twenty percent to the revenue per liter. Without that, the economics would be tight. But the company says even if subsidies were phased out, they'd break even at around sixty dollars per barrel of crude. Luna: That's a pretty resilient business model. And it's not just biodiesel — they also sell the glycerin byproduct from transesterification to soap manufacturers, and the biomass pellets to a local district heating network. Lucas: Right. The glycerin is actually a high-value stream — about ten percent of the output. So the total revenue per ton of coffee grounds is around a hundred and fifty euros. The collection and processing cost is about a hundred euros, so they're making fifty euros per ton before overhead. Luna: That's a solid margin for a waste to energy operation. Are there other companies in Europe doing something similar? Lucas: There are a few. In the UK, Bio-bean used to operate a similar facility in London, but they shut down in 2021 due to financial difficulties. In the Netherlands, a startup called 'Coffee Based' is producing biofuel and also cosmetic oils from coffee. But Coffee Cycle in Belgium is the only one I've seen that's profitable and scaling without venture capital — they're self-funded by the founders, former engineers from the petrochemical industry. Luna: Interesting. So it's not just about the technology; it's about who's running it and their understanding of the energy market. Lucas: Exactly. The founders told me the key insight was that the collection logistics were the hardest part, not the chemical conversion. They spent the first two years just building relationships with coffee shops and offices. The technology itself is off-the-shelf — you can buy a biodiesel reactor from Germany for a few hundred thousand euros. But getting a reliable, uncontaminated stream of coffee grounds at scale is the real moat. Luna: That's a great takeaway for anyone thinking about waste to value businesses. The feedstock supply chain is often the bottleneck. Lucas: And it's not just coffee. They're now looking at spent grain from breweries, which is even more abundant. A single large brewery generates about the same volume of wet spent grain as a coffee roaster generates coffee grounds. The oil content is lower, but the volume is higher. They're piloting that now. Luna: So the model could be replicated across different waste streams. It's almost like a blueprint for urban biofuel production. Lucas: That's the vision. They want to license the whole system — collection protocols, drying design, conversion parameters — to other cities. They've already had inquiries from Oslo and Toronto. If each city can turn its coffee waste into fuel for its own garbage trucks, the carbon savings add up fast. Luna: It's a nice feedback loop: the trucks that collect the coffee waste run on the fuel made from that waste. Lucas: Exactly. And with the right infrastructure, it's a genuinely scalable solution. Not a silver bullet, but a practical piece of the puzzle. Luna: So if a listener wanted to start something similar in their own city, what would be the first step? Lucas: First, map the coffee shops and offices within a ten-kilometer radius and estimate the tonnage. Then talk to the local waste management company about collection costs. Then look at the local diesel price and any renewable fuel mandates. If the numbers work on paper, then you start the pilot. Coffee Cycle's founders say you need at least three tons per day to make the economics work. Luna: That's a concrete number to work with. And the technology itself is accessible? Lucas: Very. There are multiple suppliers of small-scale biodiesel reactors — from companies in India and Germany — that can handle five to ten tons of feedstock per day. The capital cost is around two hundred thousand euros for a turnkey system. The drying system adds another fifty to a hundred thousand. So the total investment is under half a million euros, which is modest for a manufacturing facility. Luna: That's surprisingly low. I would have guessed millions. Lucas: That's what I thought too. But because the process is essentially the same as conventional biodiesel plants, just scaled down, the costs are well understood. The trick is consistent feedstock supply and low-cost collection. Luna: So, in summary: coffee grounds to biofuel is viable, profitable at scale, and replicable — but only if you nail the logistics. Lucas: Exactly. And that's probably the most important lesson for any waste to value business: the waste is cheap, but getting it clean and dry is the hard part. Luna: Thanks, Lucas. That was a really eye-opening look at a practical circular economy solution. Lucas: Glad you found it interesting. I'll be back next week with another story from the front lines of manufacturing.