If you've been keeping up with our coffee blog, we're sure you've heard the fantastic benefits coffee can have on your health. Coffee is well known as a super-food that is chock-full of antioxidants that can reduce the risk of cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's, and other health problems. Coffee can also help focus the mind, helping you stay alert and spark creativity.

The downside is that each year worldwide, 6 million tons of coffee grounds end up in landfills where they ferment and emit methane, a greenhouse gas that is "25 times more potent than carbon dioxide." Thus making coffee a significant cause of climate change.

The good news is that scientists have been working hard to find new ways to recycle and reuse these used coffee grounds, and some exciting ideas are emerging. Here are three of the most recent and essential studies.

First, there was a study conducted by the School of Engineering at the RMIT University at Melbourne. The scientists found that "the carbon footprints and environmental impacts related to construction projects are concerning, but SCG's (spent coffee grounds) have potential use as aggregates in construction materials across a broad range of civil engineering applications."

Another study from Tianjin Chengjian University showed that SPGs effectively remove pollutants from wastewater. "For ultrapure water production, results showed that catalyst and oxidant wielded a great influence." So spent coffee grounds can help us remove toxins from water to create ultrapure water.

Another promising study from Erciyes University in Turkey this year found that coffee grounds can be a highly efficient biofuel. "Integration with biorefinery in general and with pyrolysis process in specific is considered the most successful solid waste management strategy of SCG."

Although these studies prove to be good resolutions for SCG, most of today's government recycling programs have not set up a program to reclaim spent coffee grounds for recycling. Some startups, an example being Uk-based BioBean, collect these spent grounds and use them as a revenue source, but it is still a very new idea.

We have shared some ideas of how you can use your spent coffee grounds here to inspire our customers on how to put your used grounds to use instead of throwing them in the trash. But it is new stories such as these that give us hope and some excitement at the thought of coffee's unlimited potential to help better this world.