Former students of the University of Colorado in Boulder are finding new ways to enjoy the outdoors while protecting the environment.

In a garage in Golden, Maddie Cataldo and Maya Nefs may have a million dollar idea.

"The dream is to make the coffee industry circular," said Cataldo.

It started with an idea from her father, which eventually became a project at CU Boulder, where she and Nefs were students and teammates on the Buffs club women's hockey team. The concept? Taking coffee chaff, which is a byproduct of the roasting process, and combining it with soy wax to make fire starters. 

"The skin of the bean kind of pops off like popcorn during that process," Cataldo explained, "We take [a coffee roaster's] chaff from them, and our fire logs and fire starters come from it."

The result is a fire starter that is non-carcinogenic and burns with similar potency. When the duo graduated in 2023, Maya decided to go to work with her friend and former teammate. 

"Maddie was still working on the project, and I was between jobs and I decided to partner up," she told CBS Colorado. 

The fire starters are compacted into small bricks and smell like baking chocolate when in production. When they burn, Cataldo said, they don't emit any odor.

The project was so successful that it took home the top prize in this year's NextCycle Contest, which is put on by Recycle Colorado. That netted the startup $5,000 as well as a bit of credibility to attract the attention of local coffee businesses and hardware retailers. 

"It's opened tons of doors for us," said Cataldo. "Just the feedback and outreach we've gotten since that win has been amazing."

Given the size of some coffee companies and how much roasting is done across the country on a day-to-day basis, roughly two billion tons per year of coffee byproducts are wasted, according to a published in Science Daily. The Blazin' Joe team believes their idea is scalable and is already looking at bringing on more hands to help as the orders start to pile up. 

"We just entered retailers in January, and that's been really awesome," said Nefs. 

Currently, the products are on shelves at McGuckin's in Boulder as well as the Lucky's Market chain. 

"Seeing the product on shelves has been so fun and makes it feel so real," Nefs added.