Chelsea Graduate Diploma Textile Design

Last year Commons invited a group of students from Chelsea Fine Arts Graduate Diploma in Textile Design to work on a project to find innovative uses for our spent coffee grounds. Globally there are 2 billion cups of coffee drunk a day. Commons makes a few hundred of those – but yet we still create dozens of kilos of spent coffee grounds per week.
‍
Spent grounds aren't an easy product to recycle for a number of reasons, including their high acidity and the fact they are moist after being used. But we knew that brighter and younger brains than ours could rise to this challenge.

We asked the students to come and collect bags of spent grounds and to imagine new uses for them. They came back to us a few weeks later with the outlines of their designs and we were so blown away by them we thought we had to display them in store. The students then went away and refined them, and the results are what you see here today.