E058 - Matt Keniston from BioBean

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Welcome back to the Green Element Podcast, where we feature business leaders and innovators transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable. I'm your host, Will Richardson, and I can't wait to meet our guest today and help you on your journey of sustainability. Matt, welcome to the Green Element Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. I don't know where it is— weather's like where you are. It's absolutely glorious sunshine, a great summer's day here in Edinburgh. So you work for Biobean, an award-winning clean technology company, first in the world to recycle used coffee grounds on an industrial scale.

Wow.

Okay, welcome to the podcast, and I can't wait to hear more.

Thank you, Will. I'm sorry to say it's not as glorious as it is in Edinburgh. It's raining. I'm talking to you from, well, the edge of the Fens. So we're in North Cambridgeshire, but we're based on an old And that's where the BioBean magic happens. But yeah, it's a bit dreary today.

There's always this kind of smug feeling that you get if you live in Scotland when you know the south is just not as nice. I don't know what it is. Should I say that out loud?

It's against nature, that's what it is. The sun's always shining in the south and it's grim up north. Enjoy your smugness, it won't last.

Oh, brilliant, thank you. Just been knocked down off my perch. So you're the head of waste coffee recycling for Biobean?

Yeah, amongst— as a startup, we all, I guess, wear many hats, but my role in the company is I'm responsible for getting new business in, which means at one side of the business there's the coffee waste. Unlike most normal traditional businesses, you can go and buy your raw material. We have to kind of put in the supply chain to get our raw material. So one of my roles is dealing with our waste coffee partners, anyone from the big retail chains to the big coffee shops, the service stations, down to the sort of individual little hipster coffee shops that can recycle their waste coffee via waste management companies. So I deal with that kind of anything sticky, wet, waste coffee coming inbound to the factory. Then I also oversee product sales going out. So I do the inbound and the outbound. Interesting place to be because I can never win. There's either too much coffee coming in and not enough products going out, or there's a requirement for too many products going out and we haven't got enough coffee coming in. So We've got this kind of seesaw in the middle. Yeah, but that makes it all the more interesting.

Yeah, I bet. So tell us more about what you— so you're taking these used coffee granules in from a variety of different sources, and what do you make them into?

There's an amazing array of properties in waste coffee. When we think about waste coffee, especially coffee that comes from sort of retail coffee machines, the the big chains, the bean-to-cup machines. I mean, that's— coffee is an amazing resource, you know, it's grown, it's roasted, it's then used, but we only really, you know, we run some hot water through it, you know, that releases some of the lovely flavors that we end up in our hot cup of java. But a lot of those amazing compounds, the smells, the fragrances, the reasons we drink coffee in the first place, are still prevalent in the waste. Not in such great abundance, So when we get the waste coffee into our factory, you know, there's the smell, the fragrance is still there. There's amazing sort of colorants in there. There's nuttiness, there's roastiness, and we can actually distill those from the oils and from the coffee grounds, concentrate them, and we've actually got a raw material for other ingredients. So it might be an ingredient in a drink, in a food, in a cake mix. It could be a cake mix. back into the coffee world, it could go into cosmetics. So that's the sort of biochem piece is really important to us, but it's a— coffee is still an amazing resource even once we've had our coffee. So you've got the biochem side, you've also got lots of oil in coffee, but you've also got the solid biomass as well, and that solid biomass is an amazing fuel. So you can turn that into a pellet, which is for sort of industrial boilers. So we've got people burning our pellets that were originally burning oil, so heating oil to heat greenhouses over the winter. They've now swapped their boilers for biomass boilers, and now they're able to burn our coffee pellets, which was, you know, destined for landfill, to actually burn those coffee pellets in their biomass boilers and heat their greenhouses. Those greenhouses could be growing salad crop for the supermarkets, and actually we collect a lot of waste coffee grounds from supermarkets. So you've got this lovely kind of circular loop thing going on, a circular economy piece, just with our coffee pellets. We've also got a retail product, which is our coffee logs. So anywhere you can burn a wood log, you can pretty much burn a coffee log. And we started selling those 2 seasons ago, and we've gone from selling— I think we sold 70 tonnes in the first year to 700 tonnes. I think last year we sold about 250,000 units. That's an 8-kilo bag of— it's a solid fuel. You know, people burn it predominantly in sort of, you know, Eco-designed stoves in their homes.

And when they burn it, is the same amount of CO2 let off as burning a normal log? This may sound like a really stupid question, sorry.

It's that very misused term carbon neutral, but we are carbon neutral. If you imagine that coffee plant, you know, sequestered carbon from the atmosphere as it grew, as it grew beans, So, you know, that plant sucked in carbon, and when we turn it into a fuel, it releases that carbon back into the atmosphere. So we're not— you know, the problem being fossil fuels digging up carbon that's been buried in the ground for millions and millions of years and releasing that into the atmosphere is bad. But actually, our pellets and our coffee logs are carbon neutral.

I can understand that, but I think you're doing yourself a disservice because you'd immediately relate that to anyone that burns their wood from their garden, for example. It's exactly the same as what you've just said. But what is different between me cutting down a tree and burning it in my fire is that that tree has already been used for something else. So it's a byproduct. So I think you're doing yourself a disservice by saying that.

Absolutely. And, you know, if this coffee waste ends up going to landfill, And, you know, the conservative figure of how much coffee waste there is in the UK is about 250,000 tonnes. That is a vast amount. You could fill the Royal Albert Hall 10 times over with that amount of coffee. If that was going to landfill and left unattended, anything that rots down like that releases methane. Methane is by far the worst greenhouse gas. We all know about CO2, but methane is 28 times more lethal. So actually, you know, by us taking it away from landfill, we're actually saving a lot more CO2 by burning it.

Yeah. So how was BioBean conceived and conceptualized? You know, what's the story behind BioBean and how have you got to where you've got to?

It's a great story. Arthur Kay was the founder of BioBean. He started in 2013. Arthur was an architecture student at university. He was tasked, I think it was in his second year, of looking at the coffee shop and making it more sustainable. Arthur, very bright lad, realized there was all this coffee waste coming out. Thankfully, UCL, where he was studying, world-class laboratories. So literally took a bag of waste coffee grounds into the lab, gave it to the men in white coats and said, what is in this? And they then said, you know, we've got oil, we've got the fragrance compounds, carbon biomass. So, you know, all around it's an amazing resource. So Arthur then sort of put some people together, got some minds around it and thought like, right, how do we do this? But as I said earlier on, you can't just go out and buy waste coffee grounds. You've really got to kind of disrupt the market a bit. You've got to put yourself between the coffee shops and the landfill, between the coffee shops and the anaerobic digesters and say, hey, this is the best way to recycle your coffee. That takes time. So 2013, I think our first product to market was a coffee log, and that was in 2016.

Right.

So that was the first product. So it took a long time from, from the idea to actually have a first product, and then to be at the scale we are now, where, you know, we're processing thousands upon thousands of tons, and we're a workforce now, I think, about 38 people today. And if you imagine, there's, you know, there's an office staff, there's finance, there's marketing, there's sales, there's feedstock in, but there's also a factory where we're running 24-hour shifts at the moment because we're starting to build coffee logs for the winter season. So you've got a factory with forklift drivers, with engineers, with, you know, it's a big enterprise now.

So I'm just trying to work out what— so we've got the history of it and where you're going. And do you buy the coffee grounds off your companies or do they give them to you?

Typically, we are a commercially sound way of getting rid of your coffee grounds. Typically, if you've got a ton of coffee grounds and you need to get rid of them, where are you going to take them? Right.

Okay.

So if you take that to the local dump, there's going to be a charge for haulage for taking that ton from your be it a factory or a cold press or a coffee shop, to the local tip, to the local landfill site, and then they're going to charge you £98.50, which is the landfill charge tax, which is—

That's terrible.

People sending things to landfill. So, you know, £100 a tonne plus haulage is what it's going to cost you to dump coffee. You can dump coffee with us and we don't charge any gate fee. So as long as you're happy to cover the haulage, which should be a lot less than what you're having to pay at landfill, there is definitely a saving. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's other things to do with coffee. You know, people compost it, people send it for anaerobic digestion, which is great. They're great means of— good ways of recycling things like food waste. The problem with those technologies is they don't release the value of that coffee. So if you send it to composting, it's a much better way of dealing with waste coffee than going to landfill, but you don't get the chance to extract those really interesting compounds and potentially reuse them. So you're missing out on a whole raft of opportunities by sending it to compost. We think we are definitely a financially competitive way of disposing of coffee, but also, you know, we're adding value because, you know, if we sell a flavor or ingredient from our waste coffee ground, that means that someone doesn't have to go and buy a brand new virgin raw material and extract that flavor from that material. So if you look at— think about the sort of waste hierarchy of what we should be doing, you know, we should be reducing consumption to begin with, and that's what Biobeen does.

Have you always been in the waste industry, or what got you into sustainability?

Personally, I just love waste. Always have done. No one says that. I've always been very keen on sort of like the outdoors. I think you'd have to be really disconnected to enjoy that kind of life and not need to kind of understand the environmental issues, especially the ones we're facing very plainly today. So I retrained 10, 12 years ago, but I was living in the West Country then, and it was kind of boom time for renewable energy. So we were able to ride on the crest of, you know, there were good subsidies for solar, for wind power. I came into this via biomass. So if you think we make a biomass pellet, I had a background in sort of industrial biomass boilers. So that was my kind of connection in. You know, I didn't imagine 5 years ago or 3 years ago that I would be dealing with thousands of tons of coffee waste. I'm just a lucky guy, I guess.

And have you always been interested in Sustainability? Has it been a running theme in your life, or what— I mean, what— has there been a tipping point for you? What would you say is the reason that you are a lucky guy?

Well, I think it was definitely what crystallized it was living in the West Country, where it is so pure and beautiful. And I remember living in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, and the only way to heat my cottage was with kerosene, with heating oil. I remember just, you know, every year I'd have to ring up the man and he'd deliver in You know, 600 litres of kerosene. And it just seemed really, really archaic that we're having to kind of, you know, suck this oil out of the ground and burn it and release all this carbon into the atmosphere. It just seems ridiculous. And you kind of— I think it's— you have these kind of lightbulb moments. I remember just looking at the tank, looking at the house, looking at the, you know, my bank account having just been hit for £500 or whatever it was, and just thinking there must be better ways. And that's when I started looking into, you know, solar energy, wind energy, and that's how I kind of got into the business.

Brilliant. I love finding out why people get into sustainability, and everyone's got their own different reasons and motivations as well.

Yeah, I agree. But I also think that corporations are now starting to understand that. I see a real sea change at the moment. It's really quite positive. But even 2 years ago, we were having conversations. Conversations were all about commercial benefits, which is fine. People need to make money and it's all about commerce, etc. But more recently, I've had conversations with some sort of leading sustainability people embedded with these big multinationals who are much more interested in the sustainability story. Now, don't get me wrong, that drives the bottom line because they're end consumers are driving this. We need to look at our big corporations and say, you know, what are you doing with your waste? What are you doing with your energy consumption? And I think people are now prepared to sort of vote with their feet. You know, people don't want to deal with companies that are involved in dubious activities. I think corporations are sort of being forced to clean up their act. But that's great because it forces them to do the right thing ultimately.

Absolutely, absolutely. Where do you see Biobean going in the future, and how do you think you're able to influence change?

I mean, the future is bright for Biobean. We're in a really good place, and, you know, I've been here since we were definitely in startup sort of phase when I arrived, and we kind of— I feel that we've gone through our stroppy teenager years, and we're hopefully coming out into something a bit more kind of mature, which is great because it's just a bit more settled. Hopefully we'll become you know, the norm that if you're a business and be it a coffee shop or a big retailer or a restaurant, that you just go— and it's a no-brainer— you just go, right, my cooking oil needs to go here, my food waste needs to go here, any food that, you know, I can actually put back into the food chain, you know, we need to share that with people as well. So we've become one of these kind of 10 or 12 segregated resources which just become, you know, the normal thing to do. And again, with BioBean in the UK, there's masses of coffee we don't get. We'll take as much as we can get and we will build our factory to accommodate it because it's such a precious resource that we can just keep on building it. And the solid fuel side is great. There's also, you know, there's lots of new avenues we're exploring, and whether that is, you know, bioplastics, there's— the biochem side of it is really in its infancy.

Right.

I can see big growth in that because we've got a whole floor of a laboratory which we use from the University of Hertfordshire. And I go in there and there's 4 or 5 people working every single day. There's bits of kit I don't even know what they do. But I sit in on meetings and people tell me what is in this and what we can use it for and how we can segregate it, all done in a very environmentally friendly way because prior to us doing it, there was lots of techniques of extracting oil, extracting compound, but lots of them were very heavy in using other chemicals. So we're trying to pioneer processes that are very gentle, but I think that's where the real growth is. But, you know, our coffee pellets, you know, we've only really— you know, we're selling to 3 or 4 people at the moment, and there's lots of people out there that could utilize our pellets. I say, why chop down a virgin truly when you can actually make a pellet from waste. And if you can stop that all going to landfill, all the better. So yeah, the future is bright. And, you know, we're thinking at the moment— well, we're thinking more than thinking, we're looking— we've got some product landing in Europe in September. We want to test the market out there. A lot of coffee drinking in Europe, and there's a lot of coffee factories in Europe. So sort of Northern Europe, Holland, Germany, we've got our sights on potentially doing a mainland European Biobean. So that'll be exciting. So yeah, watch this space, there's a lot going on.

Brilliant. I'm gonna have to ask you how your environmental management at Biobean goes, considering that's what we do. But are you good at your own environmental management as an organization? And what sort of— do you have your energy reductions in your factory? I'm assuming the answer is going to be yes here.

The biggest one we've implemented and it was so close to my heart because when, as a startup factory, you don't have the money to do all the environmental or even cost savings that you'd like to do, you just don't have the CapEx to do it.

Yeah.

You know, when I arrived, we were still using— and this was at pilot stage, we moved on quite quickly— but we were using fossil fuels to dry our coffee. We needed to get to a stage where we proved the concept in the kind of pilot plant, but as soon as we did that, It allowed us to raise funding. So we've now got a 2-megawatt biomass boiler, which may not be very exciting to anybody listening, but it's very exciting to me. So that actually now allows us to burn carbon-neutral fuel to dry our waste coffee grounds, which is amazing.

That's brilliant.

That's really good. There's always— there's more improvements. We've got LED lights, we've got, you know, there's a tranche of stuff. We're not perfect. We're not quite at passive factory stage in a while yet, but, you know, we're absolutely mindful We had a conversation this morning about our packaging for our coffee logs is recycled paper, and it causes us problems because it doesn't sit out in the rain very well with the other solid fuels on the forecourt. You know, should we change to plastic? No, absolutely not, because we're a sustainability company. So we have to walk the talk.

Yeah, I think that's almost perfect in a way, because to understand that you've still got stuff to do and to be physically or actively Doing the reductions is a much better place than arrogantly saying that you have nothing else to do. It's much better.

There'll always be something you can do better.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I remember we started working, say, for our first companies 15 years ago, and I genuinely thought things would dry out. But those companies over, you know, 13, 15 years have changed and they have reduced Every year, year on year. It's kind of weird. I still find it a bit weird, to be honest with you, because— but it's all about reductions, isn't it? If it's 5%, it's 5% was bigger 15 years ago than it was now, but it's still 5%.

Mm-hmm.

Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for today, Matt. It's been really interesting listening to you talking about Biobene and what Biobene are doing. I know we were chatting before this. I've seen it in a few of our clients' offices. So I now know an awful lot more about what it is that you do, and thank you for helping change the world and help the world become more sustainable.

Not at all, Will. Pleasure talking to you. If any of your listeners want to get in touch with us, info@bio-bean.com gets you into the inbox, but we're happy to talk to people about how we can get your waste coffee. If you're an office in London, if you're a cold press company with lots of waste, give us a shout and hopefully we'll find a solution of getting those coffee grounds to us.

That's great. We'll put all the LinkedIn and Facebook stuff and everything on the website when we've uploaded the podcast. Thank you again, Matt.

All right. Cheers, Will. Take care.

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