Belfast team turns brewery waste into valuable carbon

Engineer readers may be surprised to read that carbon is a valuable resource. We, along with many other media outlets, commonly use “carbon” as a shorthand for emitted carbon dioxide and talk a lot about reducing it, to the annoyance of some of our commenters.

But elemental carbon does indeed have value. “Liquid forms of carbon are normally shipped to the UK from the Middle East, and solid biocarbon, in the form of wood pellets is shipped from the US and elsewhere,” said Ahmed Osman, from the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Queen’s University Belfast, who has led a project to convert brewery waste into activated carbon and carbon nanotubes, two forms of the element of particular value to industry.

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Breweries and distilleries in the European Union throw out 3.4 million tonnes of barley every year, spent after being used to make alcoholic beverages. Osman’s team reports in the Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology a novel and low-cost process for turning this mountain of soggy grain into valuable carbon.