CHAFF CO.
I made a pen from
coffee waste. It taught
me why I stopped
using plastic.
Coffee chaff is the papery skin that comes off coffee beans during roasting, a waste stream nobody wants. We used Material Driven Design to find out what it’s good for, and made a small “product range”: a pen to show its looks, paper to show it’s practical, and a candle to involve every sense.
Five senses, one waste stream
We tested chaff for sight, touch, smell, sound and even taste. We burned it, cast it, pressed it and mixed it with binders, to map its aesthetic and emotional qualities against the energy it costs to process.
Beautiful, and wrong in the hand
The chaff pen machined like any other pen, and its look is completely its own. But the binder was essentially acrylic. Despite all that organic material inside, it felt like plastic in the hand: not warm, not alive.
That’s the moment I decided the feel in the hand beats the look. Since then my pens are wood and ebonite only.
