Use Coffee Grounds or Tea Leaves as Green Printer Ink


Coffee Grounds
Coffee is a safe ink. (Vera de Kok)

Printer ink or toner literally costs more than blood or even gold, plus the cartridges are wasteful and the ink may contain toxic compounds. Have you considered going green and using old coffee grounds or tea leaves for printing?

The RITI Coffee Printer uses coffee dregs or tea leaves to print documents. If you’ve ever stained your clothes or upholstery with coffee or tea, you know the pigments are sufficiently stable so that anything you print today can be read years down the road. I wouldn’t expect the printing to be anywhere near as dark or crisp as what you’d get from a laser printer, but it’s a nice green alternative for those less-critical projects. Another interesting ‘feature’ of the printer is that’s it’s hand-powered, presumably to save electricity. That guarantees you won’t use it for printing big documents, but I think the coffee grounds ink idea has a lot of merit, don’t you? After all, coffee stains last practically forever.