About cities and coffee | Arthur Kay | TEDxHackney

Arthur Kay is an award-winning designer and entrepreneur, the co-Founder and CEO of bio-bean, a green energy company that recycles waste coffee grounds into advanced biofuels. Arthur came up with the idea for bio-bean whilst studying architecture at The Bartlett, UCL. He currently holds positions on a number of boards associated with social enterprise and green entrepreneurship and is a Fellow of W​IRED​, the RSA and IoD.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

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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)