Researchers transform coffee waste into eco-friendly bricks – BeanScene

Researchers at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne have found a way to recycle coffee waste into eco-friendly bricks.

According to the team at Swinburne, the coffee industry in Australia sees more than 1.3 million cups sold every day, which equates to around 10,000 tonnes of spent coffee grounds each year, most of which ends up in landfill where it produces methane.

The university’s researchers set out to reduce the amount of used grounds going into landfill and instead reroute the waste into an innovative product for the building industry. Their result was a low-emission brick made by blending used coffee from cafés and restaurants with clay, then adding an alkali activator. This process allows the bricks to be baked at just 200 degrees Celsius, 80 per cent lower than traditional firing temperatures.

The eco-friendly bricks project led by Dr Yat Wong has reached a commercial milestone with an IP licensing deal with Green Brick to bring the product to market.

“It’s lighter on energy, faster to produce, and designed to reduce electricity-related CO₂ emissions by up to 80 per cent per unit,” says Dr Wong.

Green Brick Founder Philip Ng outlines how it’s not just about disrupting the brick but also redefining how construction materials are valued in a net-zero economy.

“For the last century, materials have been judged by one thing: cost per square metre, but in the next chapter, we’ll judge them by carbon, transparency, and circularity. And those metrics favour a whole new kind of product,” says Ng.