Coffee Roasting Goes Green with 80 Percent Energy Efficiency

Reader Contribution by Kale Roberts
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Organic and fairly traded, shade grown and locally sourced– the list of factors to consider as we peruse the coffee aisle at the grocery store can be lengthy. But how many of us have thought about

the pollution and energy consumption contributed once those exotic beans have left their home country and reached the roaster? 

“The dirty secret of the coffee roasting business is that coffee roasting is a dirty business,” says Duncan Elcombe, Sales Director for Loring Smart Roaster, a company pioneering super-efficient coffee roasting. “When coffee beans are roasted they go through a series of endothermic (absorbing heat) and exothermic (emitting heat) stages. Eventually they start to emit large amounts of smoke and volatile compounds. In some parts of the country this smoke can just be pumped into the atmosphere.” 

This is not to mention the enormous energy consumption conventional coffee roasters use — more than one million Btu per hour during roasting. To prevent toxic smoke from entering the atmosphere, responsible roasting companies send smoke through a series of afterburners, using even more energy. Roasting technology like this has not changed for over 100 years, making it, according to Elcombe, “one of the last Dickensian, industrial revolution technologies still in widespread use.”

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