London project 3D prints furniture and lighting from tea and coffee waste

Taiwanese designers Chao-Chun Kung, Ching-Yu Lin and Chen-Yang Chang have used tea leaves and coffee grounds collected in London to produce furniture, lighting and sculptural objects through large-scale robotic 3D printing. The project, titled After the Last Sip, was exhibited at Fab.Pub in East London during London Design Festival.

The team collected used tea leaves from bubble tea shops in London and spent coffee grounds from local cafés. The residues were then dried, ground and compounded with polylactic acid.

The designers ran material tests to examine how particle size, composition and blending affected the color, texture, translucency and structural behavior of the composites, before moving into production.

Parametric design was used to generate the object geometries, and the composites were printed at Fab.Pub on a large-scale robotic system. The finished pieces retained their printed layers, visible particles and irregular textures rather than concealing them, leaving both the material origin and the manufacturing process apparent in the final objects.

Kung’s CHA / 茶 drew on Taiwan’s tea-drinking traditions, using tea as a material, a cultural reference and the basis for a custom parametric system derived from the Chinese character 茶. 

Lin’s Undetermined Shore used coffee-ground composites to create layered, sediment-like surfaces inspired by Taiwan’s shifting coastline. Chang’s Nexus Bloom and Unfolding Bloom explored continuous parametric geometries through digital design and 3D printing.

The exhibition also included material samples and traces of the fabrication process, documenting the testing, failures and discoveries behind the project.