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RITI Printer Uses Your Coffee Grounds For Eco Ink
Jason S. writes to tell us that for those seeking to "go green" or those just wishing to try something different, RTI now offers a printer that uses coffee instead of ink. In addition to recycling your grounds, the printer also uses good old fashioned elbow grease to move the grounds cartridge back and forth, saving power. Sounds like a novelty that will die quickly as human sloth reasserts itself. "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."
With the amount of coffee I drink, the entire building would have an supply of used coffee ground ink.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
What would happen if someone poured a bottle of Coka-Colaâ into the printer?
if you run out of coffee, you can brew up some TPS reports!
The kind that is completely impractical and stupid. I notice they didn't include any actual pictures of said device, or, more importantly, what a printout from said device looks like. I'll eat my hat if the lines are even and the color stays worth a damn and if the thing doesn't constantly jam up.
I read the internet for the articles.
i wonder how the manual moving it works, with a motor u get a good constant speed... but manual, not so much, and it seems like that kind of thing would affect the quality of prints...
sigs... don't talk to me about sigs....
But if I use my coffee grounds for ink, what will I mix with eggshells to put in my garden?
Free Martian Whores!
Coffee don't fax worth a damn!
"Who modded this informative? Whoever it is must've been smokin' some of that martian pot!"
No doubt the next big thing will be a urinal/generator fueled (indirectly) by beer. The Super Bowl could generate enough power to satisfy America's energy needs for the next three weeks. And the Stanley Cup Playoffs could wean the world off petroleum products forever.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
*Snooooooooor*
What this really needs is one of those spring-wound generating mechanisms like the freeplay radio. Then you'd have a printer that *really* used no external power and you could walk away from it while its printing
Of course, that would increase the size a bit, but (much like scraping out the waffle on Vietnam jungle boots) you can't have everything, am I right?
Okay, so it would be a waste of coffee had this device required fresh grounds... but now that you've brewed your java - what else are you going to use them for?
Make the best brown pigment but is a bit pricey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak
This article is not worth the bandwidth that it is transmitted upon. I propose a motion that any further discussion in this thread will now be on how best to hunt, gut, and cook hippies.
There is no product, no prototype, no schematics. This is just a picture someone made for contest. He didn't even win.
I really do need another cup of coffee before I can print out my TPS report.
Maybe OK for all those all those twee sepia prints. Tell me when I can use my blood (magenta), my wife's blood (cyan), and our urine (yellow). It would surely be a lot less painful and cheaper than the current state of affairs.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
the printer also uses good old fashioned elbow grease to move the grounds cartridge back and forth. Sounds like a novelty that will die quickly as human sloth reasserts itself.
I would be much more willing to uses a stationary bicycle than a handcrank.
It can only print "hyper-text" and java code... Apologies to drs305 and JoshuaRL for stealing their comments
They'll scrounge for your coffee beans then charge $50 for a cartridge. At least it'll be enviro friendly :P
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
Seems to me the treatment of the Repetitive Stress Injuries incurred from operating this device would more than offset any environmental gains.
There are motors in printers for a reason.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
use sequestered carbon in a filament, contained in sustainably-harvested wood sleeve.
Move hand around to create "printouts".
Nullius in verba
Now, dont get me wrong, the idea of recycling and all that is important, but the whole "going green" frenzy that's hit this country just jumped the god damned shark. COFFEE WASTE? Using your own HAND to move the print head? At that point, I might as well go back to using my old electric blue IBM typewriter.
What the fuck does that mean?
And here I thought someone actually found a use for the burnt to a crisp more acidic than battery acid sludge that is supposedly break room coffee.
So you mean I have to get addicted to coffee before I can buy this printer...?
I have a mug-shaped coffee printer. Currently, it can only print 'o', but I suppose that's good enough if you're a ghost in UO.
The idea isn't to save wasted coffee grounds, the idea (granted, it's a really bad idea because it's unworkable) is to replace the toxic matierals much ink is made from with something that is 100% nontoxic and biodegrades 100%.
It would be a good idea if it wasn't such a bad idea.
Free Martian Whores!
If only someone could invent a way to create and transmit mail and documents electronically, so that computers can talk to each other and eliminate wasteful PAPER instead of ink.
The environmental issues with printers, so far as I can tell, are almost entirely products of certain marketing pressures, rather than any particular technological problems. That makes the adoption of an inferior technology seem rather pointless.
In the case of inkjets, the trouble is not the ink(which is used in 10s of milliliters and doesn't contain anything especially nasty) or the cartridge(which could easily be made of a recycleable plastic); but the whole razor/blades model. The fact that it is, in many cases, cheaper to buy a new printer than a set of replacement cartridges for your old one(which will have clogged in any case, in all probability). As long as entire printers are made to be cheap disposable crap, making them out of anything but sunbeams and compressed happiness will result in mountains of junk. If they were actually designed for reasonable service lives, maybe even repair, you'd be fine with some basic ease of recycling features(choice of plastics, greater modularity). Ink isn't really the important bit.
Lasers are more or less similar. Toner isn't exactly a salubrious tonic to the tissues of the lungs; but fine dusts never are, it is otherwise just plastic and carbon black, sometimes some iron oxide. If a friendlier material can be designed, great; but the real focus should be on the disposability of the printer and its components, and the power draw.
... and i'm in !
Using your own HAND to move the print head? At that point, I might as well go back to using my old electric blue IBM typewriter.
Which runs on espresso grinds?
Something tells me that if this actually works, their next model will not be hand-powered, and you'll have forgotten you called it stupid. And jumping the shark? Please. If in 5 years they come out with a real one, and it both saves me the hassle of buying ink cartridges AND does something usefull with the coffee grounds, it really shouldn't matter if it comes from misplaced environmentalism.
Anyway, what's wrong with the "green frenzy"? It's better than, say, the "What is brittney going to do next" frenzy.
Disclaimer: I doubt that this will actually work, so you're probably safe.
They're just rubbish.
HTH.
Deleted
Much of the flavor in coffee is from its oils. When used coffee grounds sit for not too long (less than an hour), the remaining oils start turning rancid and shortly you will find your printed items to have a rather unpleasant odor that persists a long time.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Funny, the page doesn't have a link to a printer-friendly copy of the article.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
What? seriously how much power did that take to move a print head to and fro? I can see people printing large documents, you know the 50 page specs that you click print and then go off for a walk, last thing I want to do is have to move the print head by hand.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Ideas are ten a penny.
Where the value comes is in the clever execution of those ideas.
Or, to put it another way: Xerox invented the GUI and the mouse. When was the last time you used a GUI that Xerox had produced?
Compaq have been credited with inventing the hard-disk based MP3 player. The last time HP marketed a hard disk based MP3 player, however, it was a rebranded iPod.
So how does it print color?
I can hear my end users asking now....
2 cents,
QueenB.
HDGary secures my bank
When it doesn't depend on bullshit...
Screwed that comment up big time. Mod me "-1, dufus".
That second paragraph should read "Your post reminded me of John Candy's last movie, Wagons East. The movie's premise is easterners who have come west for their fortunes and find they hate it, and want to go back
Free Martian Whores!
Don't get me wrong, I love caffeine. I'm still a geek and everything. I just get it from sources other than coffee.
Technoli
... at greenergadgets.com
Now... while I like the idea, I don't really see it working for real.
It is a nice hippie pipe dream at best.
Whoever "designed" it forgets that people don't use printers because they have bad handwriting, but because they need clear, efficient, quick and presentable printouts.
Manually powered... I don't think so.
Plus... that last point kind of defeats the eco-idea of the printer by itself.
How much water would be wasted annually that way?
Use:
1. Insert a paper in the middle of the printer
2. Put the coffee or tea dregs into the ink case on the top of the printer
3. Move the ink case left and right as you draw on a paper
4. When the print finishes, pull out the paper from the printer and wash the ink case
Some other "designs" on the list are also intriguing but most seem as they have been envisioned either by children or over-privileged westerners.
Like someone who never heard of indoor drying racks and power-socket timers and thinks that you could solve the power crisis by harnessing the immense untapped potential of doormats and trampolines.
You know... those same people that find a wallet that would overheat, smell bad, bite your hand and otherwise embarrass it's owner when he/she tries to take money out of it - a fuckin great idea.
Oh... and that portable hard-drive you have, that fits in your pocket?
Wouldn't you be a lot happier with one that needs a bag just so you could lug it around - cause it is a god damn concrete brick!
Concrete would prevent such heavy metals your portable drive is made of like imaginarium and unobtanium from leaching into the landfill.
Once you get sick of hauling 20 pounds of bricks around with you and you just chuck the god damn thing out of the window of your car.
Hopefully, one might eventually hit the inventor in the head. Or the wallet guy.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
This has to be a really stupid idea, but that is what many of these "green" ideas are.
Used coffee grounds for ink? You will not get consistant darkness, and it will probably bleed so much that the printout will be completely unreadable. Just try draw anything on paper using coffee. Regular ink-jet ink tends to bleed like crazy, some random crap isn't going to work better.
Manually operated print-head? Do they specify the number of times you are going to have to pump the thing to get a single page printed? If your arms aren't sore after printing out that 100 page general ledger, you should get an automatic invitation to the next olympics.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
For a coffee break, that is.
It says that "No worries, it works just as well with tea."
This doesn't make sense from the picture. Coffee can be ground pretty fine for espresso, but any decent tea is in loose leaves, which would most likely completely clog the tiny head pictured. Coffee is also ground in a quite variable amount of sizes, fine for espresso, pretty large for the french press.
Not to mention the problem of figuring out how to get the tea/coffee stick to the paper.
Why wouldn't they use a hand crank instead? I would think a circular motion would require less effort.
...and a brazillion points for being vaporware.
or discard anything that shows up on my screen or on my desk that boasts of its "green" ness. I'll not be a party to this bullshit.
Brewing your PHB's java?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Printer on fire? Try "Printer needs coffee"...
You just need to pipe your urinal to the "LED shower light" (ThinkGeek). It uses a turbine to power red and blue LEDs. So you can illuminate your downstairs neighbor's flickering red/green light.
You might want to enclose the light inside a translucent drain. Unless your downstairs neighbor is a greenhouse which needs fertilizer.
Conveniently, the ad for that light is what appeared next to your comment. Now advertisers are as clever as I am.
People would smell like coffee and not ass and toner.
After all, its' got a green-colored front panel, and the website has green colors.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
doing away with the motor so you don't need a big power source seems daft when you've already had to find a big power source to power the computer that it's plugged into.
Blazing Spiders
We focused on the ink cartridge since it is one of the problems when using a printer: it's often difficult to replace, costly to refill, and can stain your hands if mishandled.
. . .
2. Put the coffee or tea dregs into the ink case on the top of the printer
. . .
4. When the print finishes, pull out the paper from the printer and wash the ink case
Does anyone else think that putting used grounds in the little case and then washing it out each time you want to print something is possibly not the best way to solve the problem of messy ink cartridges?
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
Looks like the perfect printer for UPS. "What can brown do for you".
The biggest environmental issue from ink printers is the packaging and cartridge - not the ink itself. This "eco printer" does nothing to address the real issue.
The problem with the "green frenzy", at least the portion of it seen in this contest, is that it puts normal people off of environmentalism, by showing environmentalists to be a bunch of stupid, overprivileged kids who rant about "saving the world" and promote stupid, unrealistic ideas like using one square of toilet paper to wipe your ass after a big dump, rather than coming up with and promoting truly useful and eco-friendly technologies and practices such as solar water heating, and other useful technologies or practices which allow people to live just as well as they do now, but with far less wasted energy and resources.
If you want to get people interested in helping our environment (or at least doing less harm to it than they are now), coming up with idiotic ideas like a wallet that burns your hand or a printer that you have to move by hand and produces unreadable and short-lived text is only detrimental to your cause.
It sounds good, like the Gravity Lamp which won a green prize a while back. Until you activate a few brain cells and realise that it can't possibly work.
Apart from the merely practical considerations of making such a device, used coffee grounds don't stick to paper, and doesn't even stain awfully well. Used coffee goes on the compost heap.
However if there's any prize money going, I might unveil my motorbike powered by tea-bags. There are no photographs yet, but I can certainly provide a "design".
If you want to get people interested in helping our environment (or at least doing less harm to it than they are now), coming up with idiotic ideas like a wallet that burns your hand or a printer that you have to move by hand and produces unreadable and short-lived text is only detrimental to your cause.
The moving by hand bit is odd, but could just be a gimmie to simplify the design and also increase the odds of winning this competition. The coffee grounds for printing part is what's interesting, and on the extreme off-chance that it can actually be used for real printing, it won't be long before someone puts it into an automatic printer and sells it.
As far as unreadable and short lived text, the thing doesn't actually exist yet, but you're telling me it's completely impossible that it will ever work right? Did I miss something, the coffee ink doesn't have to move faster than the speed of light to be readable, does it? I'll agree it PROBABLY won't ever make good printing, but don't act like it's impossible, because you have as much proof of that as the designers do that it will work great: none.
Being of a practical turn of mind, I just tried putting some of the dregs of my last cup of coffee on a piece of paper. The results do not look promising. I suspect that to make a usable ink you would have to take the grounds, gerind them up a lot finer, and muix them with a binding agent. By that time, you have pretty well done what they already do at the ink factory. There is also the question of fading...I don't know how much of the colour in coffee grounds is organic compounds and how much is carbon black from being roasted, but I suspect that the former component will fade quite quickly.
Of course, it is the designers who have made the improbable claims, so it is up to them to prove them. Not that I would object to ink that was a little cheaper than Pol Roger Champagne. As it is, they have lost my business, I no longer bother with an inkjet printer at home.
I have an idea for a contraption that eats raw sewage and pisses oil. What? No, I have no idea HOW it does that. This is just a DESIGN contest.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Of course, it is the designers who have made the improbable claims, so it is up to them to prove them.
I think we can all agree to that.
It boggles my mind. And this one fightens me.
I remember acid paper. The hippies would...
Remember the early editions of the LA Free Press? On the masthead they printed a dot with a square border around it. The caption read "Lick this spot - you may be one of the lucky 25!" I guess that was the original acid paper.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Shampoo won a fucking competition????!!!
Coffee grounds have a high oil content and can be turned into biodiesel:
http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=could-coffee-be-the-alternative-fue-2008-12-10
thegodmovie.com - watch it
But I'm Alergic to coffee
you insensitive clod
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
Good idea, but they forgot to add the hamster + wheel.
As it is, they have lost my business, I no longer bother with an inkjet printer at home.
Exactly. I switched long ago to lasers; you can get LaserJets on Ebay for dirt cheap, and the cartridges (remanufactured) are dirt cheap ($25-30) and work great, and last for 5000+ pages. If someone has a
better method than this, I'd like to see it, but I'm very skeptical.
You can heat almost any organic-water slurry and turn it into soot, oily stuff and methane, if you heat it high enough at high pressure and the absence of oxygen. then you only have the small problem of water contaminated with organic volatiles.
I believe the process was christened Total Conversion Process or some similar marketing crap. It may be impractical, but it is not impossible to turn sewage into oil. It is both mostly carbon after all.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you