Green printer uses coffee dregs as ink

(Credit: Jeon Hwan Ju/Core77)

We've seen plenty of printers in our time, but this one is most definitely to our taste. Korean designer Jeon Hwan Ju, likely a beans person, has percolated a potent brew that utilizes coffee or tea dregs as the replacement ink.

The result is the RITI inkbox, which probably is good for only sepia printouts, but is the kind of green tech we like very much. Coffee or tea dregs are placed into the cartridge, mixed with a little water. However, using this requires powering it along with a little muscle, moving the cartridge left and right in the slot while drawing on the paper. Not quite the most efficient workhorse for your home business, but at least it's the only aromatic printout you can personalize, from Lipton to Lavazza.

(Source: Crave Asia via Core 77)

(Credit: Jeon Hwan Ju/Core77)

[jkeels]

This is a very interesting concept. i would consider it except that I dont' drink coffee at home. However, it is a great idea. The only thing I wish it had was an electric motor to move the paper through the machine while printing rather than having to hand crank it. This sort of printer would be OK for draft printouts and things that don't need to have perfect image quality.

[Pizzookie]

Holy S#!t that's awesome. Printer ink cartridges are such a waste and cost way too much. This is a great idea for printing out documents or perhaps sepia-tone photos. My family and I are major coffee drinkers so there wont be a problem supplying ink for this thing. Maybe the idea for this originated from coffee paintings. I only question why you have to move the print head by hand? Wouldn't that make it hard to get a proper image? what if you move it to fast or to slow? A person cannot match the precision of the machine moving it instead. I would still like to get this and experiment with different compositions for inks. I bet some food coloring would work to get different color inks.

[pghcraig1]

Since it is a "green" machine, I think the idea of it being somehwhat manual is to reduce the use of electricity. Though it still has to use electricity, so I wonder how much more it would use to auto print?

I can see this evolving someday.

I lost the link, but there's that great echo friendly font as well that has small holes in the letters to reduce the amount of ink used. It works pretty good as long as you don't need to print an entire document in a large font setting.

[Pizzookie]

Yes I'm sure that that was what the creator intended but i think that's a bit ridiculous. The print head on an average printer is moved by low voltage stepper motors. They don't consume much power. I don't see that sacrificing the precision of the motor to save such a minute amount of electricity is necessary. Where this machine shines is that it eliminates cartridges which are used once and then tossed in the garbage filling the dumps. Except for those of course who recycle their cartridges. Printer manufacturers don't want you to refill cartridges, they want to rape $40 from you for a new cartridge(that's about how much mine cost), they have even gone as planting them with a chip that only allows the cartridge to work once so you have to buy a new one. Printer manufacturers should take a lesson from the RITI Inkbox and make refillable printer systems and sell the ink instead of a cartridge. They would probably still charge to much for the ink but at least they wont be wasting resources on making disposable cartriges.