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

Supply

[MrEricSir]

With the amount of coffee I drink, the entire building would have an supply of used coffee ground ink.

Re:Supply

[Anthony_Cargile]

Same here. Make one that can do this AND turn empty red bull cans into paper, and I'll never worry about my printer again (Once I write the drivers, more than likely.)

And later...

[llZENll]

if you run out of coffee, you can brew up some TPS reports!

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

[AuMatar]

As someone who once wrote printer firmware, I agree. Even ignoring color, absorption, and all the ink issues- how the hell are you going to make sure the ink cartridges are moved at a steady rate so that ink can be shot at the right time?

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

[fishbowl]

I would actually like to be able to make a calligraphy ink from coffee grounds, never mind the printer application.

Re:This is the best kind of green technology

[gnick]

Thanks for pointing that out (although there really are some functioning jet-packs).
FTS:

RTI now offers a printer that uses coffee instead of ink.

No. They don't. They do offer some pictures of what one might look like if anyone ever (for whatever reason) built one.

TFS is often exaggerated or slightly misleading, but rarely this blatantly wrong.

Re:This is the best kind of green technology

[samkass]

Well, technically you don't want to shoot the ink at the right time, but at the right place. You're only using time and steady motion as a way of calculating the place. There are other ways of calculating/measuring position... but of course it'd have to be mighty accurate.

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.

Re:This is the best kind of green technology

[HanClinto]

With the two kinds of inkjet technology that I'm basically familiar with (bubble-jet and pezio-electric), neither of those require magnetic ink -- you can print distilled water if you want.

Re:This is the best kind of green technology

[Graff]

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.

Why would magnetism even factor into this? The ink in an inket printer is not magnetic, it's a simple dye that is forced under pressure onto a page where it absorbs into the surface. Laser printer toner is also not magnetic, it is usually a fine plastic powder that can be statically charged and attracted to a charged drum. There is no magnetism involved.

Coffee grounds can produce a liquid that stains and that's all you'd need for inkjet ink. I'm sure that the printing wouldn't be as good as commercial ink but it would probably be readable, at least for temporary documents. That being said I don't see this kind of device going anywhere. If you want to be "green" then throw those coffee grounds into your garden, trying to use them as ink is just way too impractical.

Re:This is the best kind of green technology

[turtledawn]

well, coffee is somewhat acidic, so start looking for recipes for acidic dyes. If you're doing calligraphy, you're probably springing for cotton paper, and cotton responds pretty well to dye baths with salt in them, so you could first start by brewing fine-ground espresso seven or eight times to get most of the pigments into the water, then add a bit of salt. If you're worried about longevity, then you could add some borax until youhave a neutral pH.

I haven't actually made any inks for a few years, and when I did they were short-life and based on fresh plant pigments (spent, crushed irises make lovely inks, but they don't last worth a damn) so I don't have any other advice to offer.

Compost

[mcgrew]

But if I use my coffee grounds for ink, what will I mix with eggshells to put in my garden?

Re:Compost

[colesw]

Well after you see your terrible printouts you can shred your paper and put it in the garden?

(not a gardener, I take no responsibility for your plants)

Re:Compost

[mcgrew]

Squirrels are people food, not plant food.

Re:Compost

[mcgrew]

Printed on biodegradable paper

Hemp is illegal in this country. Wood pulp is toxic to most plants (and us too, which is why wood alcohol will make you blind while grain alcohol makes great mixed drinks), that's why it's hard to get grass to grow under a tree. And even if you used hemp (or grass or something else) paper, it would have to be acid-free paper to not kill your plants. Ironically a good source of acid-free paper is coffee filters, except that the coffee makes them acidic.

Of course, you really want acid-free paper anyway. paper is for books, and you want your books to last as long as possible. Normal acidic paper (what you're running through your printer) lasts 50-100 years without extreme measures to keep it legible. I'm going to have to replace my paperback copies of the Foundation trilogy because after over four decades they're barely legible now.

Re:Compost

[Graff]

Wood pulp is toxic to most plants (and us too, which is why wood alcohol will make you blind while grain alcohol makes great mixed drinks), that's why it's hard to get grass to grow under a tree.

What???

Wood pulp is not toxic to plants. It's mostly simple lignin and cellulose which most plants will grow in quite happily. The reason grass doesn't grow under trees is that the shade from the tree is not good for the growth of grass. Even the "shade" varieties of grass can only tolerate partial shade.

"Wood" alcohol is actually methanol and "grain" alcohol is actually ethanol. When you ferment grain you actually get both methanol and ethanol, it's through careful control of the fermentation process that you minimize the methanol and maximize the ethanol. That's why poorly-made beers and wines tend to give you hangovers, they have a lot more methanol and other undesirable byproducts.

The reason methanol is called wood alcohol is because it was primarily produced through the destructive distillation of wood pulp. This doesn't mean that wood pulp is toxic, it just means that when you destroy wood pulp with heat in an anaerobic environment you produce toxic chemicals. If you take grain and treat it the same way then you'll produce methanol and other toxins. This has NOTHING to do with if wood pulp is toxic or not.

Please, don't start spewing nonsensical chemical information unless you know what you are talking about. And, yes, I am a chemist.

Re:Compost

[Graff]

Maybe not *pure* wood pulp, but after that wood pulp's been processed and bleached, it's not as safe as you initially indicate. See this reference for details...

Yes, the process of turning wood pulp into bleached paper can produce chemicals that have an amount of toxicity. Small amounts of dioxins, for example, are produced when chlorine is used as part of the bleaching process. However, it would take quite a large amount of bleached paper to be of any danger to a person. The real risk to the older bleaching process was to the environment downstream of the paper mill. This is where the dioxins would concentrate and cause harm to plants and animals. The bleached paper itself was usually pretty harmless.

Anyways, most modern paper mills no longer use chlorine in their process. Instead they use oxygen, ozone, and hydrogen peroxide to bleach in a way that produces a much cleaner and environmentally-friendly product. This means that dioxins are no longer being produced in the majority of paper mills.

Re:Compost

[amRadioHed]

To bring another fact into the debate, leaves aren't wood.

Meh!

[srussia]

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.

Re:Meh!

[LateArthurDent]

WTF?

I'm guessing his wife is of noble descent.

It has some limitations....

[Het Irv]

It can only print "hyper-text" and java code... Apologies to drs305 and JoshuaRL for stealing their comments

Re:Coka-Colaâ

[cbiltcliffe]

The ink would corrode the paper completely away.

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.

even greener

[bugs2squash]

use sequestered carbon in a filament, contained in sustainably-harvested wood sleeve.

Move hand around to create "printouts".

Re:Coka-Colaâ

[pdabbadabba]

Singularity!

PC LOAD COFFEE

[taxman_10m]

What the fuck does that mean?

It uses the grounds?

[Duradin]

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.

Old news

[bugnuts]

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.

Re:Old news

[eliphalet]

It's the Brown Ring of Quality!

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:Colored Pie Charts

[machine321]

Browns come out quite well.

Re:What else are you going to use used grounds for

[cbiltcliffe]

Brewing your PHB's java?

Re:Coming soon

[EveLibertine]

You underestimate the amount of beer that the 10 Canadian guys who watch the Stanley Cup Playoffs drink.

Re:Colored Pie Charts

[master5o1]

Perfect printer for Ubuntu then!

UPS

[tsnorquist]

Looks like the perfect printer for UPS. "What can brown do for you".

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.