RITI Printer Uses Your Coffee Grounds For Eco Ink 184
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."
Coming soon (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Compost (Score:3, Informative)
Squirrels are people food, not plant food.
Re:This is the best kind of green technology (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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:Meh! (Score:3, Informative)
WTF?
I'm guessing his wife is of noble descent [wikipedia.org].
Re:This is the best kind of green technology (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is the best kind of green technology (Score:5, Informative)
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:Compost (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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 [findarticles.com] for details...
Yes, the process of turning wood pulp into bleached paper [wikipedia.org] 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:This is the best kind of green technology (Score:4, Informative)
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.