For those of you who enjoy a cup of joe with your morning paper, the RITI Coffee printer offers an ingenious way to green your morning ritual: by turning your old coffee grounds into a sustainable source of ink for your printer! One of fifty top entries in this year’s Greener Gadgets Competition, the RITI printer takes the leftover grounds from your morning roast and plugs them into an ink cartridge to create an eco-friendly source of ink. Who would have ever guessed coffee stains could be be so useful!
Hosted by
Core77 and Inhabitat, this year’s
Greener Gadgets Design Competition resulted in an incredible crop of innovative consumer electronics designs, and we’re excited to offer you the
first scoop on some of our favorite designs! Jeon Hwan Ju’s
RITI printer works by replacing environmentally un-friendly inkjet cartridges with the dregs from your daily coffee. Simply place used grounds in the ink case, insert a piece of paper, and move the ink case left and right to print text.
In addition to ridding the printing process of the ink cartridge (its most environmentally un-friendly throw-out), the RITI printer also requires a bit of human action to get things going, which eliminates the need for any really significant power source. This last part of the idea seems a bit impractical, but after all that coffee you are drinking, maybe you need some exercise to burn off your excess energy!? Not a coffee drinker? No worries, it works just as well with tea.
The Greener Gadgets Design Competition has JUST announced the 50 finalists on a public voting website that seeks reader participation. We’re going to use your votes to help determine the top ten designs to take to the Greener Gadgets Conference, to compete live on stage for $5000 in prize money. Check it out and weigh in today! Whats your favorite Greener Gadget?
+ Greener Gadgets Design Competition
+ Greener Gadgets Design Competition at Core77
cool!
does it work with blood?
My favorite greener gadget is no new gadget at all. In the sequence of reduce, reuse, recycle, I’ll stick with reduce and not entertain new “gadgets” to be “eco-friendly”. And if I honestly must get something to be “eco-friendly”, I’ll get something used, thank you very much.
We cannot consume and buy our way to eco-friendliness.
“We cannot consume and buy our way to eco-friendliness” is probably the most uneducated statement I’ve ever heard. We must consume the eco-friendly products to push production and research. Without a consumer, no one will put in the time, effort and money to develop better more environmentally-friendly products. That’s the nature of Capitalism. Consumers drive the market and if the consumer doesn’t point the market to a greener, better planet then we are all doomed.
I love the idea… the human action idea might be a bit of a hard sell though. I think focusing on making a quality coffee-ink printer should be first and foremost… limiting the electric power needed should be second.
This is a great idea and A wonderful new gadget. Though it requires a bit of manual labor it is great money saver ,and work out for that matter ;3, and ideal for casual print jobs.
A response to a comment above:
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swag Says:
My favorite greener gadget is no new gadget at all. In the sequence of reduce, reuse, recycle, I’ll stick with reduce and not entertain new “gadgets” to be “eco-friendly”. And if I honestly must get something to be “eco-friendly”, I’ll get something used, thank you very much.
We cannot consume and buy our way to eco-friendliness.
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I understand that you would rather not spend more resources making new items and instead get used devices and recycling what would be junked. But by this logic one would also say that they would rather buy a used car than spare the new resources to make a Fuel Cell car to drive instead. I believe to long-term saving of such new eco gadgets outweigh the resources used to make them.
Actually, I think the additional labor is a nice, meditative touch… until you have to print thirty pages instead of three. then it would get cumbersome pretty quickly.
I’m imagining something spring-loaded… yes, a windup printer. it would go for ten pages and need a recrank. or heck, maybe more pages if done efficiently.
This is a silly idea… why print at all. Most systems today are paperless anyway. More useless junk that will end up in landfills. Put your coffee grounds in the compost heap.
Whee can i get one and average pricing?
The tweet-a-watt is the bomb-diggity – i’m a maker myself and totally into the diy ethic as a means of living, so it gets my vote.
It appears to only be a concept prototype; they don’t appear to have actually done the part where they figure out how to make it work.