Eco-friendly cycling gear made from used coffee
An enterprising Aussie sportswear company is looking to give the sportswear market a caffeine boost, by utilising some of the unique properties of coffee within their latest range.
OORR – short for Out Of the Rat Race – have created a range of cycle-wear that much like another coffee powered sportswear brand, Rumi X, recycles coffee and other materials for supposed improved performance over traditional nylon training gear.
Combining recycled plastic bottles and used coffee grounds provides a few features over standard nylon…
Designed to help improve moisture management and boost sun protection, the ‘Cafe’ range has been launched on popular crowd-funding site, Kickstarter.
The project features a way for site users to help fund the OORR’s aims of making the garments for a wider audience and increase future demands.
Featuring some innovative technologies, the high performance fabric has been developed with what they are calling a ‘Frog Skin’ nanotechnology.
The big question for many is, ‘why use coffee?’
Coffee has been part of the industry for some time, with the company owners being self-confessed caffeine addicts, not to mention that cyclists are some of the biggest caffeine consumers.
But how are the garments made? Polyester yarn is infused with the used coffee in a patented process, this mixture is then blended with more recycled polyester (from plastic bottles) during the fabric knitting process. Another reason to love the eco-claims of the manufacturers.
By adding coffee, the fabric odour control is much improved, whilst also increasing the sun protection. It does this by creating a porous but non-uniform structure that increases surface area in-turn helping the yarn refract more harmful UV light.
OORR claim that this fusion and recycling process mean their garments dry up to 50% faster than competitor products.
Each jersey contains around 5 plastic bottles, lowering the amount that end up in landfill or end up along the Australian coast.
All it takes to get your mitts on one of these jerseys (and more) is to visit the dedicated Kickstarter page for the project and to pledge a little bit of cash: www.kickstarter.com
