Barro de Café (Coffee Clay)
By-products as raw material. Product design by its Nature must pay attention to the world's problems. One of the themes that have gained the greatest attention in the last decade is industrial waste and environmental issues. It would be urgent to rethink how design could intervene in this context, looking for a way to combine the relevance of creating products through the use of waste. This project arose from the desire to create a new material, using by-products from the food industry. Different residues were investigated, such as coffee grounds, an organic material, surplus from the food industry, from the HORECA channel, available in abundance. The tests carried out verified the possibility of adding this organic material to ceramic masses, creating a material with peculiar characteristics, namely lightness and porosity. These same particularities generated the idea of exploring objects that relate the material to water. The development of this project comprised two phases. First, a set of laboratory tests was carried out with various ceramic materials and different amounts of organic matter, specifying a more effective paste, considering the variables weight, strength, absorption, plasticity and sustainability. Tests of production processes, manual and industrial, such as manual modeling, were carried out using traditional techniques, hydraulic pressing and additive manufacturing. In a second phase, prototypes were designed and produced to maximize the benefits of the material, including new products and features. This project leaves as a legacy the importance of valuing by-products aiming at a new way of recognizing their potential, and, at the same time, allowing new applications of the material
