#Trade Shows & Events
Orgatec: Digging into Materials
In our last issue, we began discussing our discoveries at Orgatec’s materials exhibition.
Beautiful espresso cups made of ground coffee beans, which would normally end up in the trash, got our attention, and from there we gathered information on several products to stir up some inspiration.
With nearly 9 million bags of coffee exported in September 2016, it’s exciting to see new possibilities for coffee ground waste. The Kaffee Form espresso cups reveal a nice solution, an everyday reminder that nearly anything can be recycled or upcycled. PLADEC, a registered trademark of the Portuguese company POLO JCP LDA, manufactures high-end architectural and decorative MDF panels for wall coverings and furniture applications. They showed how coffee grounds can be reused to create a useful product by fabricating panels out of the material.
The exhibition presented a canteen tray with husks of camelina sativa by Transferstelle Bingen (TSB), German biogenic materials specialist firm; Clarkson University (in upstate New York) explored harvesting energy with lobsters and crabs; Customind designed its Bastiaen Cargo, a light, strong and agile bicycle for urban transportation demands, coming to the market in 2017. Sustainability-centered manufacturer 8 Pandas launched a series of breakfast tableware made out of bamboo that is ground into a fine powder and heat-molded into shape.
