It appears that not only is coffee good to the last drop, but the dregs are now good for printing a document. Yes, someone has actually invented a printer that uses old coffee grounds as ink, and to make it even more interesting, the printer does not even require electricity. This coffee and manually powered printer was not entirely the product of pure inspiration. The RITI printer is designed by Joen Hwan Ju, and it has generated a lot of buzz in the gadget world.
In case you haven’t heard how the RITI printer works, you have to place the remnants of your wet and dirty coffee filter inside an ink cartridge with some water. Insert a piece of paper, and then you manually move the cartridge back and forth and it will mark up the paper. Using your own kinetic energy to power the process also means no electricity is needed, and you have all that coffee induced energy to burn anyway. Once complete, you empty the cartridge, meaning your coffee leftovers can continue their journey to the compost bin. But if speed is your need for printing, I may not suggest this product as my guess would be that the manual operation of the printer would be a fast process.
In all honesty, a late-eighties dot matrix printer would probably do a speedier job. However, your documents wouldn’t smell as mountain-fresh afterward. It might not be a the solution for full color print jobs, but its an ingenious recycling idea, and one we’d love to see make it to market.
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