Coffee Logs Burned Out: How a Circular Economy Success Story Failed

For a decade, a London startup called bio-bean quietly transformed the residue of Britain's coffee habit into fuel for its hearths, embodying the circular economy's promise that one industry's waste might become another's resource. The company collected spent grounds, compressed them into fire logs, and kept hundreds of thousands of tonnes of methane-producing waste from landfills — a genuinely sound idea that found a real market. Yet in March 2023, a factory fire in Cambridgeshire, compounded by chronic losses and rising energy costs, brought the experiment to an end, leaving thirty people wi