Reuse of coffee powder

0
2265
The research team.

A research team of the Free University of Bozen, coordinated by professor Matteo Scampicchio, has realized a study to reduce the waste produced by the coffee in capsules and pods. “Never a coffee break was so profitable. While among colleagues we sipped our espresso obtained with a machine like the ones that are now frequently used both in the offices and in the homes, we joked about the sense of guilt induced by the amount of packaging that, coffee after coffee, must be disposed – explained Scampicchio -. So, almost like a challenge, we asked ourselves whether, in addition to recycling aluminum or plastic, it is possible to recover even the exhausted pods”. There are already projects for the recycling or to create compostable capsules, but so far there have not been any studies on the exhausted coffee powder. Giovanna Ferrentino, researcher, and Sebastian Imperiale, a student of the TU München who returned to Bozen for the Erasmus project, carried out their research with the equipment of the Food Science and Technology Laboratory of the University of Bozen. This is equipped with a plant that works with supercritical CO2 (in a state halfway between gaseous and liquid), already used in industry to produce decaffeinated coffee. The same process has also been used to extract essential oils, antioxidants and colorants, as a “green” alternative to those extraction processes that use organic solvents. The recovery process of the used pods and capsules could therefore be exploited on a large scale to obtain, as in laboratory, both antioxidants and lipids, substances useful for the food industry to replace, for example, palm oil. The study (Antioxidant and Pro Oxidant Activity of Spent Coffee Extracts by Isothermal Calorimetry) was published in the US Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry.