From a lab bench to a public road.

The situation

An RMIT engineering team had found that spent coffee grounds, processed into biochar through a low energy method, made concrete around thirty per cent stronger. It addressed organic waste going to landfill and the emissions intensity of cement at the same time.

When I first took it on, it existed only in the laboratory. No industry partner, no field trial, no route out of the building.

The problem

Circular economy research is chronically under covered. Findings are incremental, the terminology is forbidding, and newsrooms consider the environmental beat already well served. Most of this work reaches a trade audience and stops there.

The deeper problem was not coverage. A promising material with no industry partner does not become a product, and industry partners do not find laboratory results by reading journals. Something has to put the work in front of them.

The approach

Rather than a single launch, the work was sequenced across the life of the research. Each genuine milestone became its own campaign: the initial finding, the first field trial, the move into government infrastructure. That kept the story alive across years instead of spending it in a week, and it meant every new partner arrived to a project with visible momentum rather than a paper.

The framing led with the everyday object and landed on the engineering. Coffee grounds are the way in, because everyone threw some away that morning. The thirty per cent strength gain is why it matters, and it was never allowed to fall out of the story.

The research team were prepared as spokespeople rather than briefed as sources, so that when international outlets called they could hold the technical line under questions no adviser was there to field.

Partners were built into the narrative rather than thanked at the end, including Talwali Coffee Roasters, an Indigenous owned business supplying the waste stream, whose involvement made the circular economy argument more concretely than any figure in the paper.

The outcome

More than three thousand media stories across print, online, television and radio, in Australia and internationally. Coverage included CNN and the Washington Post, a Reuters story that syndicated widely, and the research carried on the World Economic Forum's social channels.

More importantly, the attention brought partners. Industry and government organisations in Australia and overseas approached the team off the back of the campaigns. The material went into a first footpath trial with Macedon Ranges Shire Council, then into a road upgrade at Pakenham as part of Victoria's Big Build. It was exhibited at the Futurium museum in Berlin and attracted venture backed commercialisation.

The project was then recognised in Universities Australia's Shaping Australia Awards in the Problem Solver category, an award decided in part by public vote. I ran the media and social campaign behind that vote. The research earned the recognition. The campaign is the reason the public was in a position to give it.

Why it matters beyond universities

The transferable point is that media attention was not the objective. It was the mechanism. A technical organisation with something good and no route to market has the same problem as a laboratory: the people who could act on it do not know it exists, and will not find out through the channels the work is normally published in.

The wider programme

This sat inside a broader media programme for RMIT research teams in energy storage, advanced materials and environmental engineering, including the water battery research and, more recently, magnetic microplastics removal.

That programme was recognised with RMIT Research Service Awards in 2023 and 2024. Both were nominated by the research teams themselves, which in a university is the endorsement that counts: researchers do not nominate a communications adviser unless the work has changed something for them.