Tea and Coffee
on 30/11/09
When sat sipping your frothy, extra large cappucino with chocolate sprinkles and extra sugar, do you ever think about where all those used coffee grounds end up? There is no doubt that Britain has a booming cafe culture and when you consider that Britons drink a staggering 70 million cups of coffee a day and, as a rule of thumb, 7.25g of ground coffee is used per cup, the amount of waste begins to be somewhat overwhelming. All in all, up to around 507.5 tonnes of used coffee grounds a day. Most of this goes straight to landfill. Of course, it's not just coffee but tea, too. We may not think of something as small as a tea bag to be much of a waste issue but that's where the problem stems from. It's the smaller things, like teabags, that easily get overlooked when it comes to recycling and all that overlooking starts to add up to quite a considerable problem.
It's no surprise then, that eco-conscious designers and inventors have started to think about how we can reuse coffee grounds and teabags to create new products, redirecting the waste away from landfill sites and towards creativity and manufacturing. A whole host of different uses for recycled tea and coffee waste have been realised and judging by the speed that this trend appears to be taking off, there will be many more to come. Here are some great products we've found made from recycled coffee and//or teabags.
Japanese designer Ryohei Yoshiyuki has designed and made this ashtray entirely out of used coffee beans. His idea was inspired by the common indulgence of a cup of coffee and a cigarette when on a break from working.
images from Ryohei Yoshiyuki
Tea Shirt (quite literally!) by Meryl Smith.
image by Todd Selby
Ecological material doesn't have to be restriced to bamboo or hemp. Singex, makers of S. Cafe clothing can make two of their sportswear shirts out of just one medium sized cup of coffee.
images from Singtex
Pine Mountain's Java coffee fire logs divert 12 million pounds of coffee away from landfill each year, emits up to 78% less carbon monixide and up to 66% less creosote than cordwood logs.
Images from Pine Mountain
These examples really show that the push for us all to be more environmentally friendly is stimulating creativity and changing the way we think about invention. Designers and makers are thriving with the challenge of creating products under the new eco standards that companies are now morally obliged to abide by and the end results are, a lot of the time, fascinating and inspiring to consumers. As we progress further into the eco trend, consumers are becoming increasingly more accepting of the fact that change is innevitable and their day to day products may be made and packaged differently. They are also becoming less skeptical of eco friendly products and materials. For instance, If we cast out minds back to the first appearence of the low-energy lightbulbs, there was a lot of skepticism about their functionality and an overall disappointment about what eco products were delivering us. Consumers felt that by buying eco products, they were making a compromise in quality of life and that there was no such thing as luxury in the world of eco. However, over the years, there has been a substantial and highly noticeable advancement in the functionality and reliability of eco products and this is something that is being picked up on by the average consumer. Eco is no longer a niche market, it is no longer associated with subculture, it is now very much of the mainstream, which is helping average Britain understand and come to terms with it. The shift in the way we perceive eco has meant that non-eco products are now seen as nonsensical, unstylish and backward. It could even be argued that the majority of people now see anything that is environmentally harmful as unacceptable and simply immoral. This in itslef is evidence that our core morals are being influenced by the eco age and it won't be long until we see eco-friendly as an additional aspect of our dominant ideology.
