The disposal of organic waste poses an environmental challenge as it emits large amounts of greenhouse gasses including methane and carbon dioxide, which contribute to climate change,

I mean, yeah, but isn't it carbon neutral? The coffee comes from the earth, returns to the earth. And couldn't coffee also be used for biogas?

natural sand as the particulate’s rough exterior provides more surface area for water and cement to bind

What further puzzles me is how they decided to use coffee. Surely there are many other waste products that have the required structure. Is coffee the first thing they tried?

[–] Cenzorrll@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

Methane is produced by methanogens in landfills, methane is not really part of the carbon cycle. The cycle itself isn't self contained, so all the carbon dioxide and methane join all the rest in the atmosphere. We want to reduce any greenhouse gas sources as much as possible, whether it's "carbon neutral" or not.

They can't just use any type of sand for construction, beach sand is out of the question as it's not rough enough. It's coming to the point that it's hard to find sources of sand that don't have negative ecological impacts, so replacing that component with something else is a good idea.

I'd be willing to guess that they already tested using bio char as a replacement and saw that it worked well in concrete, then started looking at waste sources of starting material that had sandy texture, then boom coffee grounds.

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