German company Kaffeeform combines dried coffee grounds and biopolymer to create stylish-looking coffee cups and saucers that are not only durable¹ and dishwasher-safe, but even smell a bit like coffee.

 

一家名为Kaffeeform的德国公司通过混合咖啡渣和生物高聚物，发明了一种新潮时尚的咖啡杯和咖啡碟。这种咖啡杯套装不仅耐用，还可以用洗碗机清洗，闻起来甚至还带有淡淡的咖啡香。
 

 

For every cup of coffee you brew², about two tablespoons of grounds wind up in the trash. That doesn't seem like a lot, but just think about the millions of coffees consumed around the world every single day, and you'll start to see the problem. Sure, some of those coffee grounds are recycled as fertilizer or beauty products like face masks, but most of it ends up at landfills. It was while contemplating³ this issue that German product designer Julian Lechner came up with a radical⁴ new and sustainable way of recycling coffee grounds – turning them into tableware.

 

Lechner first came up with the idea of using coffee grounds to create eco-friendly crockery while attending university in the Italian city of Bolzano. "We were always drinking coffee at university," he remembers. "Before classes, after classes, meeting friends, hanging out at espresso bars -- all the time. And that's how I started to wonder, What happens to all that coffee? It was all just getting thrown away." He began consulting with his professors about ways of using coffee grounds to create a solid material, but it took him years to actually come up with a viable⁵ solution.

 

"We tried binding⁶ with a lot of different things," Julian Lechner told VICE⁷ Munchies. "We even tried sugar. That was close, but basically it was a candy cup. It just kept dissolving after being used three times." The whole point was to make the material durable, so it was back to the drawing board for him and his partners at a German research institute. Finally, after many failed experiments, long nights and liters of coffee, they came up with a mix of coffee grounds wood grains and a biopolymer of cellulose, lignin, and natural resins⁸ that seemed to behave the way Julian had envisioned it when he first embarked⁹ on his quest.

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