{"id":17882,"date":"2014-08-27T12:58:05","date_gmt":"2014-08-27T16:58:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress-367309-1145705.cloudwaysapps.com\/?p=17882"},"modified":"2014-08-27T12:58:05","modified_gmt":"2014-08-27T16:58:05","slug":"coffee-processing-wastewater-great-source-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sustainablog.org\/articles\/coffee-processing-wastewater-great-source-energy\/","title":{"rendered":"Coffee Processing Wastewater: a Great Source of Energy"},"content":{"rendered":"

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What do you do with your coffee waste<\/a>? You may add the grounds to your compost bin, or put them directly onto your roses<\/a> and other plants as a fertilizer. If you’re in the business of coffee processing, though, you’re dealing with much more waste… particularly wastewater. According to Dutch sustainable agriculture non-profit UTZ Certified<\/a>, every cup of coffee we drink requires 140 litres (nearly 40 gallons) of water to process. After that water’s used, it’s full of organic material. If it simply gets discharged into other water sources, as it often does in the developing world, it’s not only polluting water and putting wildlife and people at risk, but it’s also creating methane emissions.<\/p>\n

Not exactly the kind of guilt you want to deal with first thing in the morning, right? Of course, the people living near these facilities don’t want their water dirtied up, either. UTZ Certified has been\u00a0experimenting with a system that not only cleans up the water, but turns the methane into biogas that can be used by the facility, local farmers, and other nearby residents. After four years of testing in nineteen pilot sites around Central America, the organization has released its results<\/a>… and they look good. Among the findings:<\/p>\n