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Self-Heating Coffee Hacking
ptorrone writes "Awhile back I wrote about the new Wolfgang Puck self-heating coffee containers that took 10 years and $24 mil to develop. Well, I managed to find them in a local store and bought them to take apart to see how they work. Once activated, they reach 145 degrees in about 6 minutes. This isn't a review of the beverage, it's all about the stuff that makes the liquid hot, how it works, pictures and links to patents. I am looking in to how these could be recycled too."
He should definitely put that into the wikipedia.
This would be great for taking soups along with you. Especially for lunchs or breakfasts, or on hiking trips.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
Okay, maybe it is neat that they've been able to make this work, but doesn't it seem just a bit wasteful to anyone but me? Western society at it's best, I guess.
robert
I totally agree. I appreciate the Make post on how it works, but this product is taking throw away culture to an extreme. The convenience can't possibly be worth all the manufacturing and materials going into a single hot cup of cofee. And given the way it's packaged, there's no way you're going to reasonably recycle any of this. This is so wasteful it honestly offends me.
25 Million and 10 years? That's like employing 15 scientists and engineers at a good wage (plus room for admin overhead), all working 40 hour weeks for an entire decade.
For this low-tech device? Something doesn't add up.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
That pretty much covers it. Tear it apart, see how it works. That's been the way to "hack" for at least 50 years.
Well, I didn't have millions, my girlfriend (now wife) luckily for me overlooked that requirement.
Finally I can get a hot cup of coffee anywhere I go, because, you know, it's not like there's a place to buy coffee on every corner.
Oh wait, Starbucks...
...and a million other convenience stores, restaurants, cafes and coffeeshops.
Exactly! Being very empathetic can score you chicks, but it's just as likely to gain shopping partners.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Finally, I do buy food that I throw out all the time. I would be a big fat pig if I ate every french fry I ever bought. Is it wasteful? I dunno, everyone who grew the potatoes, transported them, turned them into french fries, cooked them and sold them to me thought they were making a reasonable profit on them. I thought it was a good value for my money - in fact I got TOO MANY with my "#4 lunch special". I ate what I wanted and tossed the rest. Then the garbage man gets paid to haul it away. Whee!
At which time it goes into a landfill and quite rapidly decomposes, providing fuel for the non-immediately-biodegradable substances to start decomposing.
The "waste" is that this coffee cup goes into the same landfill, takes up about as much space as two super-size french fry orders, and yet last, oh, let's just estimate that it lasts about ten million times as long in said landfill.
The PROBLEM here is that not all costs are passed on to the consumer OR to the provider. The cost of waste disposal is horrifically uncapitalized in the US, primarily because, aside from materials deemed "hazardous waste", there is no good way to regulate it. If waste management were properly capitalized, styrofoam cups would run for hundreds of dollars. But, it's not. You pay as much to throw out the styrofoam cup that rents landfill space on the order of eons as you do to throw out the serving of lasagna you left too long in the fridge, which will be gone from the landfill (as a discrete body of substance) in a matter of weeks.
No matter how "free market driven" an economy is, it needs to understand where free markets fail. They OFTEN fail when public goods and services are needed to handle their byproducts, and this is a perfect example of that.
In other words: yes, this is a horrendous waste of resources, and even though I do firmly believe in free market forces, I'd love for my government to step in and put a mandatory recycling program (vendor-funded) or heavy use tax on products such as this. Because it's not the producer who pays for this today, nor the consumer, nor the garbage man. It's your children and mine, who have to live in this filth.