You can smash these 3D-printed cups from GaeaStar on the ground and walk away:
Imagine the horrified looks you'd get if you dropped your paper coffee cup on the ground, stepped on it and walked away. A startup based in San Francisco and Germany says you can do exactly that with its cups, guilt-free.
GaeaStar is getting ready to introduce its 3D-printed, disposable clay cups to the US, after a successful trial period at coffee shops and ice cream parlors in Berlin. Watch the video above to learn more.
The cups are made from just three ingredients: dirt, salt and a small amount of water. Founder and CEO Sanjeev Mankotia told CNET he had the idea when he was visiting family in India and his cousin was drinking chai from a terracotta cup she bought from a street vendor. "She drank the cup, and then smashed it on the ground. And I was like, 'You're throwing something away that's creating litter.' And her reaction was, "It's made out of dirt, why is this an issue?"
Those terracotta cups, or "Kuhlars" have been used in South Asia for 5,000 years. They are typically never reused.
[...] According to GaeaStar, it can print a ceramic cup using about 60% less energy than it takes to create a plastic or paper cup, for about the same price. "When you scale it up, we feel that this could be priced in parallel or comparable to the incumbent cups in the market, if not cheaper."
[...] GaeaStar's long-term goal is to put its patent-pending 3D-printers in shops around the US, where cups could be printed on-demand in about 10 seconds. Mankotia says dirt can be sourced locally to save energy. In the meantime, you'll be able to find them in select Verve Coffee shops around California this year.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday April 26, @12:32AM (4 children)
Then the coffee would look like it tastes.
(Score: 4, Touché) by mcgrew on Wednesday April 26, @02:22PM (3 children)
Apparently you don't know what ceramics are made of. All coffee cups are made of paper, plastic, styrofoam (a plastic), or fired clay; clay is DIRT dug from the ground. You've not only been drinking your coffee out of dirt, your plates and saucers and bowls are all made of dirt, too, unless you use plastic, which is made of MOTOR OIL.
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(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26, @02:42PM (1 child)
<sarcasm>Exactly, and you've been eating dirt as well. What do you think plants are made out of? DIRT! Cows and other animals? DIRT! In fact, every time you breathe in, there's trace amounts of fuggin' dirt in there.</sarcasm>
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday April 27, @01:13PM
Plants have very little dirt in them - they're made almost entirely from water and air. And of course animals are almost entirely plants, so... more water and air.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday April 26, @05:13PM
you beat me to it. I was going to say all my coffee mugs are made of dirt, they are ceramic.
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 5, Interesting) by istartedi on Wednesday April 26, @12:43AM (11 children)
Of course some people are just jerks, but I'm given to understand that traditional products like this are one of the reasons why littering kind of became a custom and was historically not taboo. If you go back far enough, there were clay vessels like this, wooden boxes, maybe paper, etc. If you tossed it someplace, it was going to rot, rust, or burn without producing toxins. People got in to the habit of tossing stuff away like that, and it wasn't a real problem.
Then we started making other materials that took longer to break down, contained toxins, etc. The mid-20th century was probably the sweet spot for people in the USA to be accustomed to throwing things everywhere, and for those things to be toxic, as famously depicted in Mad Men [youtube.com]. (I've never seen the show, but that scene got meme'd, it's kind of famous).
That scene is set towards the end of an era--shortly thereafter the crying Indian (who in real life was actually Italian) and other anti-littering campaigns got in to the public conscience. At this point, if you're littering like that in the USA, you're really just a jerk.
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(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday April 26, @12:51AM (4 children)
Yeah, that's pretty much the case [youtu.be]. I've thought about whether the purpose of even fake recycling [greenpeace.org] is to think about sustainability (and proliferation of trash, for that matter) every time you dispose of something.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Wednesday April 26, @02:30PM (3 children)
youtu.be? Are you sending me to goatse or tubgirl? I'm not stupid enough to click that! Note, there are few aliterates at S/N who are likely to fall for shortened URLs, and far more of us can read five times as fast as any talking head can spout.
This ain't Facebook or TWITter.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by captain normal on Wednesday April 26, @05:21PM (1 child)
https://techwelkin.com/difference-youtube-youtu-be [techwelkin.com]
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 4, Funny) by Osamabobama on Wednesday April 26, @05:41PM
Oh my god! Belgium!
I'm out.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 27, @01:25AM
Youtu.be is the official URL shortener for YouTube, you fucking boomer waste of electrons.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nuke on Wednesday April 26, @09:01AM (5 children)
It was a real problem. Unless you were a member of the aristocracy, people spent their lives surrounded by piles of rubbish - called midden heaps. There were issues about where to put it all. Perhaps, just because it might not be toxic, you won't mind living like that, but I would.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26, @11:39AM
Thank you. I now have a new descriptor to describe my teenager's room to him. I can be both critical AND educational at the same time!
(Score: 3, Touché) by mcgrew on Wednesday April 26, @02:33PM
I would rather be living in the middle of that than in an American ghetto next to a refinery, or a business that releases even worse toxins.
Poor people can't afford nice neighborhoods.
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 26, @02:45PM
This could be a new heap space in Java that the GC does not visit.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Wednesday April 26, @04:25PM (1 child)
Good point. I guess it's more fair to say that it wasn't (in theory) as difficult a problem to solve. If they had actually been literate enough to read the Bible back then (or even able to afford one since there wasn't economical printing until fairly recent times) they would have realized that removing waste from inside the city was right there in the Old Testament.
As awful as South African segregated townships were, I read an account about how "shit man" was a job. No sewers, awful, people coming around to get your chamber pots and take that somewhere--but AFAIK even people that poor were generally not just shitting everywhere. It can be done, even with meager resources. I don't know what it was about the culture of Europe in the Middle Ages, but yeah, it's generally understood that it was most foul and filthy.
Now you've got me wondering if they ever got around to putting sewers in poor parts of South Africa, or if it's still like that...
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(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday April 28, @09:14AM
You don't need to go back to apartheid South Africa for that, it happens in rural areas in the UK to the present day - ie retention tanks with no treatment, called cesspits. My in-laws lived in a house with one, a "shit man" came once a week to empty it. It was at the end of the garden and it stank; this was only 15 miles outside of London. Not to be confused with septic tanks which use natural degradation and only need a yearly pump out of any insoluble solids - I have one of those.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday April 26, @01:27AM
Why indeed? [youtu.be] And that's ceramic, as well.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday April 26, @02:54AM (2 children)
There are a very few if any things that benefit from being designed for "use once, throw out". If you're going to go through the hassle of making a thing, shipping it somewhere, and retailing it to somebody who wants it, wouldn't it be better if, after it was used once, it could be used a bunch more times rather than having to make another one?
In the case of coffee, there's an obvious alternative: Bring your own mug, pay to get the barista to fill it with coffee. Or, if you're going to drink it all on-site, get a cafe mug that you return, they wash, and it's back in business in very little time.
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(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday April 26, @02:36PM
Since the coffee is so outrageously expensive in those places, they could serve the coffee out of ceramic cups (ceramics are made from dirt) you throw away when finished, and they would still make a decent profit.
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(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday April 27, @12:23AM
In the case of coffee, waiting in line to purchase mediocre coffee seems to me to be one of the more ridiculous things that people do. I have a cheap stove top percolator I bought from Cabela's long ago (when they were still a real company). I set it up before I go to bed. I set my alarm for an hour before I have to get up. When it goes off I get up and turn the stove burner to low. When I get up an hour later the coffee has usually been perking for 15 minutes or so. I get to start my day with a cup of fresh, hot, quality coffee before I have to do anything else.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday April 26, @01:33PM (4 children)
In some places, large leaves are used as single-use plates or food wrappings, so the idea is not completely unconscionable.
On the other hand, wooden plates and eating utensils (including bamboo as 'wood') have also been common. They last pretty well, but do (eventually) degrade relatively harmlessly when thrown into the general environment. The same is true of gourds for liquids. Reusability is usually a benefit.
Indian Railways tried to use these pots - see the Wikipedia article: Kulhar [wikipedia.org]. Not a success. Plastic-coated paper cups or styrofoam are preferred by customers and vendors.
Something like styrofoam that was biodegradeable would seem to be what is needed. E.g. a cellulosic chemical that is insoluble in water, can be foamed, yet also have a smooth surface, but break down in the environment. Or genetically engineer coconuts to grow in the shape of Dixie cups [wikipedia.org]. The problem with 'paper' cups is the layer of plastic makes them difficult to recycle economically, although cups manufactured without plastic are becoming available.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Wednesday April 26, @01:51PM (3 children)
You don't need plastic on a paper cup. Wax works, and even oil pretty much works for cold drinks. But plastic is cheaper, and you don't need as good a paper. (Or any paper at all.)
With clay cups they need to be very low fired or they don't degrade, and then they can dissolve into the liquid they're holding.
OTOH, a very low fired clay cup with a v.thin coat of oil would probably work. You need to pick an oil that's slightly heavy and without flavor of its own, though.
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(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday April 26, @02:39PM (2 children)
As far as the environment is concerned, there's no difference between a ceramic coffee cup and a rock.
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(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday April 26, @03:15PM
Well, if you look at origins, there is. A ceramic thing has been fired, which takes a lot of energy, and generating that energy most likely has an environmental effect, some methods more than others. Also, clay is pretty special as a resource, and there is a limited amount that is suitable and easily available (much like sand suitable for building, which is why Middle Eastern states import sand rather than just using what's in the desert). It also requires processing before use.
Of course, once you've made it, ceramic degrades like generic (igneous) rock.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday April 26, @05:34PM
There are different kinds of environmental concerns. Broken glass doesn't matter much to a mouse or a squirrel, but I don't want to walk on it. This is a similar argument. Really low fired ceramics don't have sharp edges.
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