Real coffee cups: cups and saucers made from coffee grounds

A German company called Kaffeeform has created a trendy coffee cup and saucer by mixing coffee grounds with biopolymers. The coffee cup set is durable, dishwasher washable and even smells like coffee.

Every time you make a cup of coffee, you leave two tablespoons of coffee grounds. Although the amount left may seem small, the problems that arise when millions of cups of coffee are consumed around the world every day cannot be underestimated. Yes, some coffee grounds are recycled as fertilizer or facial masks, but most of them end up in the trash. German product designer Julien Richner was thinking about this when he came up with a bold and novel way to recycle coffee grounds sustainably-by turning them into coffee cups.

Richie came up with the idea of using coffee grounds to make eco-friendly pottery while attending university in Bolzano, Italy. "We drank coffee every day in college, before class, after class, at parties with friends, at coffee bars…all the time," he recalls. So I started thinking, can these leftover coffee grounds just be thrown away?" He began discussing with his professors how to turn the coffee grounds into a solid material, but it took them years to find a workable solution.

"We tried different adhesives and even tried sugar." Julien Richner said on Vice Munchines,"Although the ingredients are very close to coffee grounds, it is basically a 'sugar cup' and melts after three uses." Making the material stronger and more durable was the central problem, so he and his partners started from scratch at a research institute in Germany. After countless failed experiments, countless long nights, and countless liters of coffee grounds, they finally created the dream material, which is a mixture of coffee grounds, wood, biopolymer materials such as cellulose and lignin, and natural resins.

Richner recalled being ecstatic to learn that the glass would not melt and would stand firm. "After studying it for so long, you have to believe that the idea is feasible and that it can eventually be realized." When I drank my first cup of coffee brewed in this cup, I had mixed feelings. The wait was not in vain." The icing on the cake is that his invention has also achieved commercial success and brought economic benefits. There are ten brick-and-mortar stores in Europe selling Kaffeeform coffee mugs, but demand is still in short supply, and the company's online store sells out every once in a while, and they've only been open for a year.

"Coffee mugs are basically sold by word-of-mouth," Ritchner said of the company's success. Orders come from different places, some of which are really unexpected. There are many individual customers buying, as well as orders from coffee shops in Saudi Arabia and the Ritz Carlton in Toronto. Even the museum in Oslo, where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded, sells Kaffeeform coffee cups.

Kaffeeform will soon be mass-producing a cappuccino cup that can also be used as a travel mug. But these are short-term projects, and Richner hopes to create practical things out of recycled coffee grounds in the future. "What's next? I want to see if I can make sheets out of it." "Maybe coffee grounds could one day be used to make furniture for cafes and restaurants," he said.