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But if you're looking for a truly novel application for coffee grounds, consider using them as a sustainable material for 3D printing, as suggested by a recent paper published in DIS '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference.

“You can make a lot of things with coffee grounds,” said co-author Michael Rivera of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the ATLAS Institute, who specializes in digital fabrication and human-computer interactions.

As 3D printers have moved into more widespread use, it has sparked concerns about environmental sustainability, from the high energy consumption to the thermoplastics used as a printing material—most commonly polylactic acid (PLA).

Adding biomass fillers (bamboo or hemp fiber, oyster shells, and yes, spent coffee grounds) makes recycling even more labor and energy intensive.

Inspiration struck while Rivera was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University and a regular at Arriviste Coffee Roasters cafe in Pittsburgh.

The dried grounds were sifted with a standard kitchen strainer to remove large clumps and then mixed with xanthan gum and carboxymethyl cellulose powders, which serve a similar purpose to binders, stabilizers, and thickeners.

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