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

[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

[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.

even greener

[bugs2squash]

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

Move hand around to create "printouts".

PC LOAD COFFEE

[taxman_10m]

What the fuck does that mean?

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.