Coffee Waste to Manufacture Biodiesel

I have fond memories of my parents' second home on Monteith Road in Madras, just a hundred or so yards away from the Coffee Board's offices. The street was lazy and my friends would come over and we would go walking towards the Rajaratnam Stadium in the evenings after class, practically every day. This, of course, was long before Madras became Chennai and that once lovely city began to stink from what has become its typical smell - a blend of the stink of rotting sewage and untreated vehicle exhausts.

Autoblog Green has some information that is partly positive - three scientists, all of Indian origin, working at the University of Nevada (a good state for the Renewable Energy Sector) have figured out a way to make biodiesel from coffee grounds which are actually waste which does not do coffee any good as far as taste is concerned. They estimate that their process could help manufacture 340 million gallons of biodiesel a year: http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/12/08/used-coffee-grounds-could-be-used-to-make-biodiesel/

I have smelled the exhaust from biodiesel cars and it is far less irritating than the smell of fossil diesel. That said, I would like to see electric cars and trucks become more popular than merely tinkering with diesel or vegetable products to manufacture biodiesel. However, anything that makes the air around us even slightly cleaner is a big plus. I do hope that the Indian government gets its head out of its collective posterior and looks seriously at this use for coffee grounds. The country produces a huge amount of coffee after all and this could be a useful byproduct that reduces dependence on the Middle East as far as keeping its trucks and cars is concerned.