For many years now, Brazil has been using blocks of discarded coffee beans as fuel in locomotives and as heating in factories. Apparently the country had such a surplus of coffee beans in the 1930s that they were throwing away bags of the beans into the sea until someone came up with the idea of forming the beans into bricks to burn as heat.
Today, Jarden Home Brands in the US distributes Java-Log “the funky new fireplace item that has quickly become the people’s choice firelog … It offers a wonderful solution to the much detested chemical smell associated with other firelogs”. In addition to the soothing sweet smell, the logs produce fewer emissions than wood, are considered environmentally friendly as they are made from waste coffee beans, and they sound like a real wood fire.
Not only are the logs made from a renewable and sustainable resource, they also help to keep millions of pounds of waste coffee beans out of landfill sites. They are cleaner burning producing less carbon monoxide and less creosote. The three pound logs are said to burn as long as other five pound logs and produce twenty-five percent more energy than wood. Another unique use of the logs is as a gardening application. Once the logs burn up, the ashes can be used to enrich soil for plants.
Rod Sprules from Ottawa, Canada, the inventor and creator of Java-Log has received patents for his product. In 2003, Time Magazine named Java-Log one of the coolest inventions of 2003. They claimed that in comparison testing, it was found that the log lit more quickly and produced taller flames than its regular counterpart.