Thank you very much for the chance to talk to you this afternoon.
My name's Arthur, and I run a small startup called bio-bean.
Today, I'm going to talk to you about two things mainly.
The first is around cities,
and how we can begin thinking about urbanism in a different way
through thinking slightly differently.
Secondly, I'm going to talk to you about coffee,
but not the next Frappuccino.
Instead, I'm going to talk to you
about the waste from this industry's supply chain.
I'm going to start off
by talking about why cities are so important.
We're all - most of us, I think, live in cities.
Most of us are Londoners.
Cities are really, really important.
They're not only the foundation of human civilization,
but they're also hubs of social and economic power
that drive development by concentrating skills and resources in one place.
I'm going to use a medium
which, essentially, is talk
about why cities have not just a concentration effect,
but also they have a massive amplifier effect as well.
Through this concentration of skills, essentially they take challenges,
and they make them much, much larger than they would otherwise be.
They amplify and enhance both the very good and the very bad,
and that makes cities increasingly important
for our future as a species.
I'm going to talk to you about why this is so important
and also about the challenge we've already heard about briefly today
in terms of the rapid urbanization, what that's going to look like,
and what it has already looked like so far.
I'm going to use the medium of photographs
of my various family members in skirts
to be able to illustrate this.
(Laughter)
This is my grandfather.
When he was born in the mid-1920s,
the world's population was still pretty small and predominantly rural,
with only about 15% of us living in cities.
When my father was born in the 1950s,
that had already doubled in terms of our urban population,
with around 30% of the 2.8 billion people on the planet living in cities.
When I was born in the beginning of the 90s,
in 1990, again, massive growth further.
So, 43% of the world's five billion people living in cities.
What's going to happen over the next 35 or so years
is this trend is going to continue.
To my mind, it's going to be the most important trend in the 21st century.
Because by mid-century, by 2050,
the nine billion or so people living on the planet
- of those people, about three in four, 75%, will be living in cities.
All these figures, they sound quite disparate,
and it's quite difficult to actually know what this looks like.
But this is a really phenomenal thing that's happening to us,
because for the first time in human history
we've become an urban species.
It's going to make a huge difference
in terms of how we start to think about how we live,
and about what the technologies and innovations
we're going to require to live as a predominantly urban species.
To show you what that looks like,
a world that's predominantly urbanized,
and over the next 35 years
that rapid growth in terms of our urban population,
that's around adding a new one of these, a new New York City,
to the face of our planet seven times every year.
Not just on a one-off basis:
that's seven times a year for the next 35 years,
adding an additional 250 New Yorks to our planet.
So it's not a small change,
it's going to be absolutely massive,
and we need to really address how we begin to design
and think about these challenges.
That urbanization, it not only means
that our urban population is going to grow,
but it also means that the challenges
that we currently think of as global problems
are going to be massively enhanced.
Also, they're going to be interconnected:
everything from infrastructure to our water supply,
everything from our diet to our economic prosperity,
everything from our waste to our energy supply.
These are not just global challenges but interconnected urban ones,
and they're going to be massively amplified and enhanced by cities.
Let me give you an example of what I mean by this
by taking a problem
I think most people think of as a global problem
- in fact it's usually referred to as 'global warming' -
and that's climate change.
We typically think of climate change as a very large global problem.
You have important and exciting people
standing on stages at places like the UN and stuff like that saying,
'We've got to tackle this.'
We do have to tackle it, but often we think of it as something insurmountable
and something that's very difficult to address and come over.
But if we take the pretty basic stat
that of all of our global CO2 emissions
around 80% of those are directly attributable to cities,
then we begin thinking
about something that we generally call a global problem very differently,
when it's demonstrably an urban one
with 80% of those emissions attributable to cities.
Of that 80%, again, when we think of cities,
we might think of thousands and thousands of cities all over the world.
Again, it's a very big and difficult problem to address.
But we can reduce that right down.
Because a very large portion of that 80% of emissions
is attributable to not just any old city or the thousands across the globe,
but just to 35 mega-cities
with populations of over 10 million people.
Again, it's just about reducing the scale of these problems
and saying, 'If we can reduce that impact and reduce us thinking
about these very grand and nebulous problems, like climate change,
if we can reduce it right down to 35 mega-cities,
we can begin to tackle the vast majority of an issue, such as climate change.'
For me this is an exciting opportunity,
because while cities can also enhance the bad things that are out there,
if you can reduce emissions in one of these 35 cities,
that can directly correlate to the bigger picture.
For the first time in our history as humanity,
if we can make a difference on a local basis,
in a small geography such as a city,
we can, for the first time, have a really global impact.
In the same way that things like software and -
We've obviously had huge innovations
in terms of things like software, the Internet and whatnot.
What they have enabled us to do
is, in a similar way, have an individual make a very large impact
through the medium of computers and the Internet.
In this case, the city acts as a similar technology
in terms of starting to be able to amplify and enhance that massively.
A slight slide change, but I know you're thinking,
'That's all very well, Arthur, but where do you fit into this?'
I'm going to now change tack a bit and swing right round,
because my interest in this goes back to my studies.
I studied architecture here in London, and became very interested in two things.
One of them was cities, as I've already bored you with.
But the second thing I got very interested in
is this behind me, which is waste.
I'm very interested in how we can reorganize
and re-imagine urban supply chains,
tying these two interests and trends together.
My particular interest was coffee waste,
because one of the projects I was set at architectural school
was designing a coffee shop and coffee factory -
one of the fun tasks you're asked to delve into.
In this case, I was looking at how we can take the waste from that building
and make it useful.
I was looking at a closed-loop system,
and how we can take the waste the building kicks out.
And, much to my tutor's disappointment, I took this challenge a bit too seriously.
Now I spend most of my life delving into that.
But my main interest was -
A lot of the students got very interested in the aesthetics of the coffee shop:
should it have a brick wall or metal wall?
These sorts of things.
But I was interested in the waste,
mainly because I found out how much coffee we drink.
Also, how much waste there is out there.
And also that the waste is pretty interesting.
So, we drink about 500,000 cups of - um, 500,000 cups?
We drink about 70 million cups of coffee every day,
and that's about 1,000 cups a second.
It's loads of coffee.
How many of you guys have had a coffee already?
I imagine most of you.
Coffee today, guys?
Yeah?
Two coffees today?
Yeah?
More than two? Yeah, nice.
We drink, as I say, about 1,000 cups of coffee a second,
and that's just in the UK.
That kicks out about 500,000 tonnes of waste coffee grounds each year.
Again, just in the UK.
It costs the industry about £80 million
to dispose of it, in terms of disposing it.
It generally ends up in places like landfill sites and whatnot.
It also kicks out a couple of million tonnes
in terms of CO2 emissions.
On discovering the amount of the waste out there,
I decided to delve further into it.
I ended up setting up a company to begin tackling the problem.
The company I founded is called bio-bean.
What we do is, we take these waste coffee grounds,
we work with the existing supply chain,
and turn them into two fuel products.
Both a bio-diesel, which is a liquid transport fuel
used for powering various urban transport systems,
like cars, buses, trains, and stuff;
and also biomass pellets, which is a heating fuel,
which is used in place of things like coal and wood for heating buildings.
I'll talk you briefly through how we do it.
We work with a variety of different waste companies,
who deliver us the waste coffee grounds.
We're in Hackney, so it's often more hipster to sell things,
but we do it at quite a big scale.
Our factory is able to process
about 50,000 tonnes of waste coffee grounds a year.
Which is around 1 in 10 cups in the UK,
or, the way I think of it, is about a hundred cups a second.
Which is - again, I like my 'per second' facts.
It's quite a lot of waste coffee grounds.
The coffee's then taken to our factory.
We take the oils out, and we turn these into diesel.
Then, we take the residual biomass,
and we pelletize that and turn these into these solid fuels.
They're then both distributed and then sold,
in some cases, back to the people who gave us the coffee grounds,
because a lot of them own coffee shops,
coffee factories, that sort of stuff,
and they need heat and they need diesel.
This is one of our trucks.
You may have seen it going around London.
This - maybe next slide - is our factory.
You can see it's big, it has a chimney.
It's got lots of exciting machines inside.
(Laughter)
I was there earlier today,
and there were lots of men doing manly things,
like welding and lifting machines -
and lots of coffee there.
This is our diesel.
As I say, coffee is a good thing for this, because not only is it highly calorific -
it's more highly calorific than wood, in fact -
it's also got a very high oil content.
It's got about 20% oil by weight.
This oil has got a variety of different applications,
like interesting chemicals and whatnot,
but also can be turned into this diesel fuel.
These are the biomass pellets, which are used, as I say, interchangeably,
in the same infrastructure as coal or wood.
That's really the key to what we're interested in.
It's not about building a whole new infrastructure behind this,
and it's not about doing this at a small scale;
it's about taking a lot of a certain feedstock
containing this at an industrial scale,
so it can then be supplied into an existing infrastructure
to displace conventional fuels.
In terms of what this looks like from a CO2 perspective -
because at the end of the day we're a green energy company,
and there's an economic play here, but also an environmental one -
for each tonne of waste coffee grounds we recycle using our technology,
we save about 6.8 tonnes in terms of CO2 emissions.
Not too many of you, I would imagine,
are going to be climate scientists or sustainability managers or whatnot.
So, in terms of what 6.8 tonnes of CO2 looks like,
it's actually quite a big saving
from a single tonne of waste coffee grounds;
it's the equivalent of driving a car or a London taxi
from here in London all the way to Beijing and back, twice.
That's from a single tonne.
Remember, our factory is able to do 50,000 of those a year,
so it's a fair amount in terms of saving
from an environmental perspective as well.
This brings me back to where I started around talking about cities,
and the importance they're going to play in our future.
It's clear to me that if we're going through a rapid period of urbanization,
and most people in the world
are going to be living in these large urban centres,
then cities need to change.
We need to first understand them,
then begin to address some of the challenges
they're going to kick out.
Also, to understand
that these are not just these vast, nebulous, global challenges,
but uniquely urban ones,
and ones interconnected by cities -
everything from our physical and mental well-being,
to, as we've heard earlier today, our diet, to our water security,
energy security, our housing, etc.
These are not global challenges, but uniquely urban ones.
If they're going to be caused by cities, as they increasingly are,
it's going to fall to cities to solve them.
Again, as I say, to me, this is really exciting,
because if we can change our locality,
we can then change the world on a much larger scale
with a relatively small impact.
Getting cities powered by coffee is just the start -
one thing this has shown me,
and my background is certainly not
in either waste or biochemicals or biofuels
or any of these exciting things,
mine's from an entirely different architectural background.
If there are opportunities like this out there,
the fact that coffee previously was being
- and still is in most of the UK and around the world -
being put into the ground at a cost to both the economy and the environment,
think how many similar opportunities there are out there.
To my mind, if we can really narrow our focus
and essentially develop a whole new generation
of different urban designers who are really focusing on this,
it's going to be a very exciting urban future for us.
Every new person who comes into the planet
has the power to create and innovate and disrupt the status quo,
and leave their city, wherever it happens to be,
greater, better and more beautiful than it was before.
Thank you all very much.
(Applause)