Only 30% of a coffee bean are soluble in water, and many brewing methods aim to extract significantly less. So from the £ 1.6 billion coffee that Americans consume in one year, more than £ 1.1 billion pounds of filters in compost containers and trash cans are bumped into.
While Danli Luo, a doctorate from the University of Washington at the University of Washington, collects the area from her own espresso machine at the University of Washington in Human Centered Design and Engineering, he saw an opportunity. Coffee is rich in nutrients and sterilized while brewing. Therefore, it is ideal for growing mushrooms, which forms a “mycela skin” before he sprouts in mushrooms. This skin, a kind of white root system, can tie loose substances together and create hard, water -resistant, light material.
Luo and a UW team developed a new system to transform these coffee outside into a paste with which they use 3D printing objects: packaging material, parts of a vase, a small statue. She vaccinates the paste with Reishi mushroom spores that grow on the objects to form this mycela skin. The skin transforms the coffee walls – even if it is formed into complex shapes – into a resistant, fully compostable alternative to plastics. For complicated designs, the Myzel melts together separately together in order to form a single object.
The team published its results on January 23 in 3D printing and additive production.
“We are particularly interested in creating systems for people such as small businesses, the small batch products produce-for example, small, sensitive glassware that need reliable packaging to send,” said lead author Luo. “So we have worked on new material recipes that can replace things like styrofoam with more sustainable things and that can easily be adapted to the production of small measures.”
To create the “Mycofluid” paste, Luo Mixed Coffee Board with Brown Rice Flour, Reishi mushroom spores, Xanthan -Kaugummi (a common food binder in ice cream and salad dressings) and water. Luo also built a new 3D printing head for the Jubilee 3D printer that the UW Machine Agency Lab developed. The new printer system can be up to one liter of the paste.
The team printed various objects with the Mycofluid: packaging for a small glass, three vase parts, two halves of a Moai statue and a two-part coffin the size of a butterfly. The objects were then covered in a plastic tub for 10 days, in which the mycelium formed a kind of shell around the Mycofluid. In the case of the statue and the vase, the separate pieces also merged.
The process is the same as that of native mushroom kits: keep the Myzel moist when it grows from a nutrient -rich material. If the parts stayed in the tub for longer, the actual mushrooms would sprout from the objects, but instead they are removed after the white mycela skin has formed. The researchers then dried the pieces for 24 hours, which continues the pulp of the mushrooms.
The finished material is heavier than styrofoam – closer to the density of cardboard or charcoal. After an hour in contact with water, it took only 7% more weight in water and dried the initial weight while maintaining its shape. It was as strong and hard as polystyrene and expanded polystyrene foam, the substance used to produce styrofoam.
Although the team has not specially tested the compost stability of the material, all of its components are compostable (and actually edible, albeit less than appetizing).
Since the Mycofluid requires relatively homogeneous coffee reasons, working with it would be difficult to find it as difficult, but the team is interested in other forms of recycled materials that could form similar biopasts.
“We are interested in expanding this materials derived from organic materials such as other forms of food waste,” said Luo. “We would like to support this type of flexible development on the whole, not just a solution to this big problem of plastic waste.”
Junchao Yang, a student of the UW master in Human Centered Design and Engineering, is a co-author, and Nadya Peek, Associate Professor of Human Design and Engineering, is the senior author. This research was financed by the National Science Foundation.