Bio - origin
On a daily basis, coffee shops and barista’s a producing tons of residual streams with selling coffee, which otherwise go to waste.
Motivator
Finding an application for the wasted coffee grounds to extend its life-time and be functional and useful again in our man-made world.
Could we use the Bio-origin perspective to valorize this material in our human world?
Biological waste stream from coffee shops rescued from going to incineration.
Start from a bio-origin, so designing of biology.
Biomakerspace, the concept of attributing a function to a material made from waste coffee grounds exists.
Coffee grounds are inherently biodegradable and moist, so knowing how to process them into functional products that only degrade at the right time is key.
This means taking into consideration the type of binding agent, the way the coffee grounds are processed, what application area it will be applied to.
Coffee grounds are the residues of preparing the famous coffee drink, which is extracted from roasted coffee beans.
Since this is a fully natural drink, we could connect peoples daily lives again by providing them of way of drinking coffee from a natural type of container that is derived from the coffee supply chain.
Social acceptance
Coming from the perspective, coffee grounds will be used in a functional product. In this way, it will be important to check whether people will experience the use of waste coffee grounds in their product acceptable or not.
Coffee cups are mostly made from plastics and in many coffee shops, the coffee cups to go are throw-away.
What if a coffee cup could be made that you bring yourself to the coffee shop to top it up and then get a discount for doing so as a customer.
In this way, both the coffee shop and the customer save and benefit from this on the long-run.
Starting from a natural feedstock
Starting from waste coffee grounds, you will soon notice some interesting properties, like the typical coffee fragrances, odors, and its dampness, the beautiful dark brown hues, the small grains which could act as a filling material.
Starting first experiments with the waste coffee grounds as filler material in biobased binding agents.
Changing mindset
Reusable coffee cups that can be initially purchased at the coffee shop and reused over and over, needs a mindset shift in both the shop owner/staff and its customers.
Human Centered Design (HCD)
Try to bridge the gab between the natural world and materiality with the everyday live of the user. Why would a coffee drinker want to start using reusable coffee cups? Are they any benefits from doing this.
Conduct interviews
Organize codesign sessions with coffee drinkers
What does the journey of a coffee drinker and a coffee cup look like?
Lab equipement & Machinery
In the biomakerspace, use for example a drying oven or dehydrator to dry-out the waste coffee grounds, before any further processing steps.
Then use a grinder to mill the coffee grounds to a homogenous grain thickness.
Decentralized systems
Start considering to source waste coffee grounds with local coffee shops, but also in terms of local production.
Material application
What if we start envisioning an application area where the sensorial properties of coffee grounds come to use in our man-made world.
Tests are performed of heat pressing the waste coffee grounds into coffee cups.
This is a first step into cycling back and forth between the human- and the bio-perspectives of your process. The aim here is to seamlessly blur our human and natural world into one unity, as showcased with the fading colours.
A possible concept = Kaffee Form
Reusable coffee cups.
Manufactured from locally produced waste coffee grounds in Berlin. It is collected, dried in a social workshop and processed into products such as this reusable coffee cup.
No petroleum-based polymers used, only biopolymers.