When I was in college, I spent my summers at a Garden Centre where they sold all kinds of arcane stuff – including mulch made from Cocoa Bean husks. Now McDonald’s is recycling the husks from Coffee Beans as an ingredient in plastic car parts for Ford…
Researcher adds Coffee Chaff to prototype cooker at University of Guelph…
It started as a notion among members of a research team at the University of Guelph who were looking for alternatives to petrochemical-based polymers in structural plastics. After trying a number of natural materials, Coffee Bean Chaff (as it’s properly called) stood out as an obvious candidate for further research.
What they are doing
Ford has agreed to take a ‘substantial portion’ of McDonald’s Coffee Chaff waste for the new plastics process.
After cooking the Chaff in a high-pressure, low oxygen environment, the resulting material is sent to Competitive Green Technologies in Leamington, Ontario, where it’s turned into resin that can be used to mold all manner of plastic objects. The first production-run auto parts made from Coffee Chaff that Ford will use will be headlight assembly housings for the Lincoln Continental. However, the company says it already has plans to use Chaff plastic in many other car parts if the initial production trial proves successful.
What it takes
Competitive Green Technologies CEO Atul Bali told Automotive News Canada it takes the Chaff from 392,000 coffee beans to make one housing unit. But there will be no problem getting enough raw material. McDonalds throws away 1.2 million pounds of Coffee Bean skins each week. The high-pressure, low oxygen process that converts Coffee Chaff into resin manufacturing feed stock approximates the natural process ancient vegetation underwent to be turned into coal and oil.
Headlight housing for Ford’s Lincoln Continental is the first
production part to be made from Coffee Chaff…
A true win-win-win situation
Recycling the Coffee Chaff into plastic is truly a ‘everybody wins’ scenario. Ford wins, McDonald’s wins, the environment wins…
Previously, Coffee Chaff was either spread on farmers’ fields as an organic soil amendment, used in making Charcoal briquettes, or simply burned.
The takeaway
“McDonald’s commitment to innovation was impressive to us and matched our own forward-thinking vision and action for sustainability,” Debbie Mielewski, Senior Technical Leader of Ford’s Sustainability and Emerging Materials research team, said in a statement. “This has been a priority for Ford for over 20 years, and this is an example of jump-starting the closed-loop economy, where different industries work together and exchange materials that otherwise would be side or waste products.”
My take
Let’s give Ford and the University of Guelph a big hand for their invention. This is the kind of partnership we need to see more of if we’re to win the sustainability war and save the environment from the dismal fate many folks now say it faces. Of course, as the environment goes, so do we. Which makes exploring this research and development model further all the more urgent…
~ Maggie J.