Coffee grounds

Paris, France

Type of waste: agricultural

There's nothing more romantic than warming your hands around a hot café crème or latté and watching the city of Paris wake up. With its strong café culture, Paris offers no shortage of spots to sip a steaming cup of flavorful, aromatically-charged coffee. This however is also a big reason why their landfills are covered with coffee waste

Smart and Green

Smart & Green is a company which transforms used coffee grounds into eco-friendly firelighters, such as logs and firelighters. Taking advantage of coffee's high lipid content (around 6%), which gives it a high calorific value—67% higher than firewood—they developed their own industrial process to compress this waste into a clean, efficient, and practical fuel.