Skip to main content

Would you buy a pair of shoes made from coffee waste?


When life gives you coffee beans, make sneakers.

Helsinki-based Vietnamese designers Son Chu and Jesse Tran have managed to create high-quality shoes made of used coffee grounds and recycled plastic. The company, called Rens Original, says the kicks are waterproof, light, durable and odor-resistant.

A pair of these unisex slip-ons weighs about 460 grams – 300 grams of that is coffee. The equivalent of six discarded plastic bottles is also used in each pair. They're made by infusing the used coffee grounds with the plastic bottle pellets. Once infused, this material is then spun into a polymer yarn where it is then knitted onto a waterproof membrane.

So if you want to help the environment while shopping for fashionable kicks, perhaps Rens is perfect for you.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Adorable Sculptures of Yen Yen Lo

These images are from a series of wall sculptures created by Yen Yen Lo . Here you can see her intricately textured ceramic pieces, looking downright adorable. Yen Yen Lo's eye for the unique and whimsical is delightful. Apparently they are not intended for kids under 16. Fifteen-year-olds cannot be trusted with fragile stuff. Get them a Funko Pop instead.

Weirdly Charming

If you’re a fan of art that makes you do a double-take, you need to check out  Richard Brener . Based in the UK, Richard is an internationally collected artist who works primarily with ink, fineliners, and gouache. When you first see his pieces, they actually look pretty playful. Then you realize the entire canvas is packed with thousands of tiny, ghost-like shapes he calls "champs." They’re all squeezed together like commuters on a rush-hour train, and the level of detail is honestly mind-blowing. Richard spends hundreds of hours drawing these little guys over and over. It’s obsessive, very intentional, and a little bit wild. The cool part is that the longer you stare, the more the vibe shifts. Check out more photos below:

Photographer documents her stay at a mental hospital with haunting self-portraits

Most documentary projects about mental illness reveal someone else's behavior, but Laura Hospes took a very different approach. The Dutch photographer documented her stay at a psychiatric ward, and her raw, striking and sometimes unbearable black and white self-portraits reveal the reality of what it's like to recover from anxiety, depression and eating disorder following a suicide attempt. The project, which Laura called UCP-UMCG, (named after the hospital in which she stayed) earned her a spot on LensCulture's list of 50 best emerging photographers for 2015 in the LensCulture Emerging Talent Awards. One picture shows her staring blankly ahead while clad in a sleeveless shirt. In another, she is depicted lying on a bed, half naked. "At first, I made this complete series for myself, to deal with the difficulties and express my feelings,” she told The Mighty . "After that, I want to inspire people who are or have been in a psychiatric hospital. I want them to s...