Lattes, Frappuccinos and Maybe Detergent?

With 1.3 billion tons of food trashed, dumped in landfills and otherwise wasted around the world every year, scientists at the 244th meeting of the American Chemical Society in Philadelphia described the development and successful laboratory testing of a new “biorefinery” intended to change food waste into a key ingredient for making plastics, laundry detergents and hundreds of other everyday products.

And the world’s most well-known coffee house is involved in the project.

Starbucks revealed that as part its new sustainability project to reduce its carbon footprint, the firm has recently started working with those biorefinery scientists to transform food waste, like coffee grounds and stale bakery items, into key ingredients that will go into several products including making plastics and laundry detergents.

The project involves nonprofit The Climate Group and the City University of Hong Kong, and will be first be introduced at Starbucks Hong Kong.

“Our new process addresses the food waste problem by turning Starbucks’ trash into treasure — detergent ingredients and bio-plastics that can be incorporated into other useful products,” said Carol S. K. Lin, Ph.D., who led the research team. “The strategy reduces the environmental burden of food waste, produces a potential income from this waste and is a sustainable solution.”

The idea took shape during a meeting last summer between representatives of the nonprofit organization called The Climate Group and Lin at her laboratory at the City University of Hong Kong, according to ACS.

The Climate Group asked her about applying her transformative technology, called a biorefinery, to the wastes of one of its members — Starbucks Hong Kong. To help jump-start the research, Starbucks Hong Kong donated a portion of the proceeds from each purchase of its “Care for Our Planet Cookies” gift set.

“We are developing a new kind of biorefinery, a food biorefinery, and this concept could become very important in the future, as the world strives for greater sustainability,” Lin explained. “Using corn and other food crops for bio-based fuels and other products may not be sustainable in the long-run. Concerns exist that this approach may increase food prices and contribute to food shortages in some areas of the world. Using waste food as the raw material in a biorefinery certainly would be an attractive alternative.”

According to Lin, the food biorefinery process involves blending the baked goods with a mixture of fungi that excrete enzymes to break down carbohydrates in the food into simple sugars. The blend then goes into a fermenter where bacteria convert the sugars into succinic acid, which can be used to make everything from laundry detergents to plastics to medicines.

At ACS, Lin said that the process could become commercially viable on a much larger scale with additional funding from investors. “In the meantime, our next step is to use funding we have from the Innovation and Technology Commission from the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to scale up the process,” she said. “Also, other funding has been applied to test this idea in a pilot-scale plant in Germany.”