London buses to run on coffee

London’s red buses will soon run on waste from coffee shops, after London based Bio-bean agreed to conduct a demonstration project with oil major Shell.

Bio-bean has partnered with thousands of coffee shops across the UK to collect the coffee grounds and turn them into biodiesel, which will be blended at 20% with normal diesel.

“It’s got a high oil content, 20 percent oil by weight in the waste coffee grounds, so it’s a really great thing to make biodiesel out of,” Arthur Kay, founder of Bio-bean, told Bloomberg.

Bio-bean was founded in 2013 and has received funding from Shell and private investors.

The announcement comes as the EU debates whether to ban crop-based biofuels by 2030.