Bioeconomia do café: o reaproveitamento da borra como insumo

Abstract

The bioeconomy is defined as an attempt to better use natural resources in all sectors of the economy, covering industry and agriculture to generate biological products at a price that is affordable for the market, but with a reduction in the generation of waste from of production processes and use of clean raw materials from reusable and renewable sources. One of the main residues generated is currently biomass from coffee extraction (better known as coffee grounds), which, if disposed of incorrectly, leads to environmental degradation and a consequent increase in the emission of greenhouse gases, such as global warming . In this sense, the objective of this work was to estimate the costs of building a composter as an alternative to disposing of the coffee grounds in the environment and thereby mitigate the effects of offset potential of CO2 from residue coffee extraction at the Federal University of Lavras. For this purpose, monthly coffee consumption information from the “CafEsal” School Cafeteria of the Federal University of Lavras was used as an example. The point out that the disposal of coffee grounds in landfills or dumps of all the coffee consumed in Brazil, in 2020, generated 14.6 billion tons of CO2. Only one “CafEsal” cafeteria at UFLA, in 2020, emitted 115,632 kg of CO2 . The results induced that the Cafeteria Escola “CafEsal” emits about 2.3 million kg of CO2 per year, making it necessary for the cafeteria to plant more than 16 thousand trees per year to neutralize its approvals. In one day, a cafeteria would need to plant 68 trees to neutralize its 9,636 kg of CO2 emitted. Remembering that this market is potentially large, since a year in Brazil it is estimated a production of 545 million tons of coffee grounds or 45 million tons per month. Thus, as a way to create an alternative to avoid the disposal of the coffee grounds in the environment for the Cafeteria Escola “CafEsal”, the cost of implementing a composter on the campus of the Federal University of Lavras was estimated. When considering the operation of the composter from the processing of 200 kg generated monthly by CafEsal, the costs reach R$ 21,371.26, which represents a small scale of work and, therefore, high the cost of the final fertilizer produced (R $106.85/kg), requiring a sales price of BRL 149.59/kg. However, the assembled structure can work with a capacity of up to 2 tons/month, which would represent a substantial reduction in both the total monthly production cost (BRL 10.69/kg) and the sales price (BRL 14.95 /kg).