• Coffee Brewing Methods
  • Coffee Reviews
  • Coffee Stories
  • Coffee Recipes
    • Spring Recipes
    • Summer Recipes
    • Fall Recipes
    • Winter Recipes
    • Holiday Recipes
    • Party Recipes
  • Coffee Musings
    • A Taste of Coffee World Tour
  • Coffee Perks

Coffee Magazine

K-Cups, Coffee Reviews, Coffee News, K-cups, Everything you Want to Know About Coffee!

Advertorial

You are here: Home / Coffee Stories / Starbucks Goes Green-er with Coffee Laundry Detergent

Starbucks Goes Green-er with Coffee Laundry Detergent

September 6, 2012 by admin

[adsense]

Starbucks, an already impressively green company,  is now taking it one step further by experimenting with a new recycling process that would turn their leftover coffee grinds and pastries into laundry detergent and bio plastics.

Students at the City University of Hong Kong are leading the way on this biorefinery process that involves combining baked goods and fungi in order to reduce the carbohydrates into simple sugars. Then, the materials are set to ferment in a vat where bacteria gets to work on turning the sugars into succinic acid. Succinic acid helps produce a number of things such as laundry detergent, medicine, and even plastic.

As an example of what a difference this could make in Starbucks waste disposal, the Starbucks in Hong Kong currently produces around 5,000 tons of coffee grind and pastry waste a year, waste that is generally incinerated, dumped in a landfill, or composted. Now imagine that waste being recycled into something useful yet again. I know we’d buy some Starbucks brand laundry detergent – especially if “Coffee Scented” was an option.

Filed Under: Coffee Stories Tagged With: go green, laundry detergent, recycling, starbucks

Pricacy Policy
Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in