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."

Comments

This is the best kind of green technology

[jandrese]

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.

Re:This is the best kind of green technology

[ivan256]

It was a design competition. And I don't mean the good kind of design, where you get into technical details, either. More like the kind of design you get when you put marketing and upper management into a room together.

This printer won't jam up, because it doesn't exist. File it with jet-packs, and flying cars under "fiction".

Re:This is the best kind of green technology

[jandrese]

As I think about it, the thing can't work like an inkjet, coffee grounds are not AFAIK magnetic. It doesn't seem like it would work like a laser printer either, as it would be difficult to build up enough charge from mere linear motion of the hopper to power a laser. Also, again, coffee grounds are not magnetic. As a thermal wax type printer it would fail too since coffee grounds burn, not melt. About the only mechanism I can think of that would work is just using mechanical pumping action on a microscopic scale, but that still doesn't answer the question of how you're going to grind up the grounds fine enough to be useful and more importantly, how you are going to get them to stick to the paper.

The more I think about it, the stupider it becomes.

Re:This is the best kind of green technology

[ivan256]

It hasn't. Not entirely, anyway. Things need to pass the back-of-the-napkin sanity test first. Then you can say "cool, neat idea". Space elevators seem more plausible than "water + used coffee grounds = ink".... You can't even get dark enough coffee for drinking out of half-used grounds, much less ink.... And that doesn't even get into the paper handing voodoo that is required to make a functioning printer before you try to do crazy things like moving the print-head by hand.

For starters, the "good kind" of cool ideas generally come with some basic initial investigation into feasibility already done.

So now RSI is good for the environment?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

Solving the wrong problem.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:holy hell. Green Zealots, this is insanity.

[Grishnakh]

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.