Circular economy - Material experimentation - User experience
8 October - 16 November 2018 Group work : Filippo Tomasi ~ Manoj Sahi
Cuffea is a project submitted for the Open Ideo Next generation cup Challenge. The brief was to design a circular economy alternative to single use coffee cups that are made of paper and plastic to avoid spills. During the research phase we found that the coffee fruit is usually a wasted byproduct of coffee production process. We then thought that we could valorize this part of the coffee to make it truly circular. We realized that the coffee cherry is high in polysaccharide, antioxidants, polyphenol compounds such as proanthocyanidins, chlorogenic acid, quinic acid, ferulic acid and caffeic acid, which makes it an ideal choice to substitute plastic in our Cuffea cup structure, because of temperature resistant and fluid barrier functions. Cuffea cup is made out of three layers. The middle substrate layer is from the used coffee grounds, while the inner and the outer layers are from the coffee cherry. All these materials meet the health and safety standards of food-service industry. I contributed on the design of the circular system and on the development of a prototype of the cup (employing a spinning machine to uniformly deposit the material in the desired shape.