Imagine you own a coffee shop. Day in and day out your employees fill trash cans with coffee grounds and half eaten pastries and your customers follow suit with mountains of paper and plastic cups.

Those trash bags fill up your dumpster at a surprisingly fast rate before being taken away on trash day. And that’s just part of doing business.

According to the US EPA, in 2013 we had reached a ~34% recycling rate. At least the other two-thirds of our waste is piling up in landfills.

Instead of tossing all those used cups and coffee grounds in the dumpster, what if your coffee shop could feed them into a magical machine that in turn provided your business with electricity?

The prospect of this may be closer than we think.

Introducing arensis

arensis is a “Power Plant as a Service” company and principal of Entrade Energy, the German-based technology provider.

In our post, solar for homeowners, we described the commonly chosen option of a “power purchase agreement” where instead of owning your panels, you pay for the power they produce at a rate comparable to or cheaper than the low end rate from your traditional utility.

arensis offers power purchase agreements in the same way as solar providers.

What makes its systems different is that they generate electricity and heating and cooling from a renewable fuel source in biomass and different kinds of organic waste.

In 2014, the world record for solar efficiency was at 46%. Entrade technology puts that to shame operating at an overall efficiency of 85%.

With 200+ generators up and running around the world, arensis mostly services industrial operations. But as it expands the types of waste that can be fed into its generators, its service will become available to a wide variety of businesses.

Types of waste currently under research include:

This is the kind of innovation in energy that we’ve been waiting for. Not only do arensis systems provide a renewable source of energy, but they lower both carbon and waste footprints simultaneously.

An additional benefit is that the shipping containers that hold the generators make them easy to transport and scale as needed.

To learn more, visit their website and follow along with them on Facebook.