From PSFK (their site redesign by Jack Cheng), via EcoGeek. Hope Howard Schultz reads this, they could use the cash:
Engineers at the University of Nevada have reported that they’ve created a high quality bio-diesel fuel made from coffee grounds. They believe that they could produce about 340 million gallons of fuel from the world’s used coffee grounds, and make $8 million in profits from Starbucks’ waste alone.
We’re guessing John Mayer would have sold fewer records had he gone with that line instead of his (‘your body’s a wonderland’- good call, John), but we think it is a pretty cool image. Imagine a future in which much of the energy we exert throughout the day (walking, dancing, running…) is captured and converted into electricity.
Just as we’re able to harness the motion of the ocean and convert that into electricity, someday we’ll put nanogenerators in almost everything. Imagine capturing the energy of a tennis match in the handle of your racket. Imagine storing the energy used to type on your keyboard all day long. Imagine nanogenerators in your ski pants that could power your iPod. We’re already seeing innovative- if not terribly efficient- signs of this future. We see dance floors that capture the energy of dancing feet, machines at the gym storing power used to lift weights, and, most recently, a cafe in the Netherlands (pictured here) that has turned it’s revolving door into a generator. So far, each of these examples produces only modest amounts of usable electricity. You might never power your computer through the clippety-clop of a keyboard, or even produce the energy required to brew your coffee by going through a cafe’s revolving door, but the cumulative reserve of lots of little generators might actually bring us closer to a truly sustainable future.
