Your daily energy source for breakfast

Stop throwing coffee dregs (sediments) off the pipe.

The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, an American well-known chemistry magazine, claims that spent coffee grounds can turn into biodiesel thanks to its oil. If you want to read the original before continuing click here.

Just as it happened years ago with Colza and soy oils, new ways of producing biodiesel are being sought. Thanks to coffee lots of money and energy would not be wasted providing we start keeping its dregs at home. I wonder if ColaCao ones would also work.

Image: Taken from Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

The main problem could be the logistics. As well as oil recycling is becoming a normal activity, coffee recycling (reconverting) could also be included as such in our daily lives.

To be honest, it is very unlikely to see this technology in the near future. We all know that sometimes can be pretty tiring, but we are talking about figures with a considerable number of zeros.

Students from Tecnun, take on board the idea of keeping the coffee wastes. You can collect thousands of tones.

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Smart ideas people that are not us have

Stop to think for once how many movements we do on a daily basis that go nowhere.

(25 minutes later...)

Now try and design a device that makes the most of that lost energy, which could be kinetic, potential,...

(Some time in the future...)

Well... let me introduce to you some very interesting and original ideas to generate energy by using "wasted" energy:

A revolving door that produces 4600kWh per year has been installed in Holland. This happened in the Natuurcafe of La Port Train Station and thanks to the door's kinetic energy of rotation several LEDs can be lit.

Source: Inhabitat.com - The World’s First Energy-Generating Revolving Door

In Sweden, they are planning to submerge so-called "sea kites" to take advantage of tidal energy (energy from sea waves). This system designed by Minesto consists of a turbine-equipped kite attached to the bottom of the sea. It starts thanks to the impulse of the tidal energy and manages to converse it into kinetic energy which, provided water density, it generates 1000 times more energy than eolic energy systems do, the company says.

No, they are not planes of World War I

Source: "Sea Kites" Could Harness Tidal Energy For Future Power Plants


I have came across a good idea. While I was writing, I was constantly spinning over the office chair I'm sat in, you know, those that have wheels and armrests. I just thought of putting a dynamo in the juncture between the two halves that spin so that I could produce energy, even more than the 4600kWh of the not-so-good idea of the revolving door.

Source: Me.

Now it's your turn to demonstrate that you have ideas to make the most of that "wasted" energy. Send us your comments!

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