A New Use For Coffee

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23601, 9 March 1940, Page 7 (Supplement)

A New Use For Coffee

A NEW use has been found for coffee, which last year Brazil was burning because there was no sale for it. It can be made by a new process into another of those plastic materials of which examples are seen all round us: in door-knobs, in combs and the backs of brushes, in unbreakable cups, and in insulators for electric cables. The coffee plastic will fulfil many of these uses, if not all of them, and it has a particular quality of its own because it may be produced in s;reen, red, mahogany, brown and yellow and black without dyeing. It derives these colours naturally from the green coffee beans out of which it is produced. It is moulded at a pressure of 2000 to 50001b. to the square inch, and when further treated by the processes now perfected in the Brazil research laboratories, it can be drilled, sawn and polished, and turned into the required shapes. A bag of coffee weighing 1321b. is converted into a plastic material of 40 square feet area and one inch thick. In its manufacture a by-product of more than a gallon of coffee-oil is obtained, and this can be used for lubrication or in paint. —Children's Newspaper, London.