真正的"咖啡杯"：用咖啡渣制成的杯碟
Company recycles coffee grounds into durable coffee cups
German company Kaffeeform combines dried coffee grounds and biopolymer to create stylish-looking coffee cups and saucers that are not only durable 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 brew, 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 contemplating this issue that German product designer Julian Lechner came up with a radical new and sustainable way of recycling coffee grounds – turning them into tableware.
当你每泡一杯咖啡时,都会剩下两大匙的咖啡渣.虽然看似剩下的量很少,但是当每天全世界消费数百万杯咖啡时,带来的问题就不容小觑了.的确,一些咖啡渣被回收利用作为肥料或是面膜类的美容产品,但是大多数的咖啡渣都被丢进了垃圾堆.德国一位产品设计师朱利恩·理奇耐在考虑这个问题时,萌生了一个大胆新奇的、可持续回收咖啡渣的方法——将其变为咖啡杯具.
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 viable solution.
理奇耐在意大利波尔扎诺上大学时提出了一个设想——利用咖啡渣做环保陶器.他回忆说："我们在大学每天都喝咖啡,上课前,下课后,跟朋友聚会时,泡咖啡吧时……无时无刻不在喝咖啡.所以我就开始思考,这些剩下的咖啡渣就只能被丢掉吗？"他开始和他的教授们讨论如何把这些咖啡渣变成坚固的材料,但是他们花了几年才找到一个可行的办法.
"We tried binding with a lot of different things," Julian Lechner told VICE 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 resins that seemed to behave the way Julian had envisioned it when he first embarked on his quest.
