The sustainable beer coaster
Client
District Rotsoord ( City of Utrecht)
Mission
Find out what circularity means for start-up companies at Utrecht Rotsoord and design an experience or a product that draws attention to circularity at Rotsoord.
Used Technology
Adobe Photoshop 3D, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, 3D printer Ultimaker
The goal of the project was to raise awareness of circularity for businesses in the Utrecht district of Rotsoord. Circularity means that when designing a product you already think about the next life of a product or parts of that product.
The City of Utrecht would like to see companies in Rotsoord working together more in the field of circularity. Therefore we went to visit the owner of Café de Camping. He told us that they already do a lot in the field of reusability, but that throwing away used, wet beer coasters is still a problem.
“400 beer coasters are thrown away every day”
Of course, that’s far too many. We wanted to come up with a solution for this.
First we started researching whether there was already a solution for this. The examples we saw were beer coasters in the form of an open grid. The beer liquid sinks past the glass onto the beer mat and ends up on the table through the openings. The result, a wet spot on the table.
As a solution, we designed a dense square beer coaster with the same size as a normal beer coaster. The slits in the beer mat catch the moisture that slides down the glass. We created this design with a 3D printer and tested it at Café de Camping. As expected, the beer mat worked and kept the table dry.
