Americans drink an estimated 491 million cups of coffee each day, according to the National Coffee Association. That’s a whole lot of java – and consequently, a whole lot of waste.

Switching to mugs and reusable double-wall tumblers can help put a dent in the number of single-use cups tossed in the trash, but what about all the used coffee grounds? Right now, the majority of grounds end up in landfills, where they make the soil more acidic and generate greenhouse gases like methane as they decompose.

Elemental Bottles (asi/51846) offers the coffee shirt (ESHIRT4W) made of 50% recycled coffee grounds and 50% recycled PET.

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One company trying to help solve this issue is Elemental Bottles (asi/51846), an eco-minded supplier that’s expanding from reusable drinkware to apparel, with its recently released “Coffee Shirt.”

The dress shirts are made of 50% recycled coffee grounds and 50% recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET). Making garments and other promotional products from recycled plastic water bottles has become more commonplace, says Seth Inyang, co-owner of Elemental, but incorporating coffee grounds is a differentiator for the supplier. At first, he adds, he and co-owner Vinh Lieu liked the idea of coffee-derived fabric simply from the “cool aspect” – cashing in on a beverage that has near-universal appeal.

But then, Inyang adds, Elemental started looking into some of the performance properties the textile has, including UPF protection, moisture-wicking ability and an ultra-soft hand feel. “It’s three times more odor-resistant than your standard recycled polyester shirt,” Inyang says.

For Elemental, it’s important to offer products that people want to use, not just guilt consumers into making an environmental choice. “If you’re going to pay a little bit more money for this, you’ve got to really love this shirt,” Inyang says. “So, if it’s going to be made out of recycled material, it has to feel better than any other material that you would use. With the coffee shirt, we found this material is just extremely soft and silky smooth, and it feels better than any other material we’ve tried.”

Elemental sources the recycled coffee ground fabric from Vietnam. Inyang notes that the production process is proprietary, but mentioned that the fabric basically is created via a “high-pressured, low-temperature process” that adheres the grounds to the rPET after it has been woven into yarn. “It’s a lot less energy-intensive” than other materials that have been called sustainable in the past, he adds.

Coalatree, an eco-minded outdoor gear brand, also has a line of clothing made from recycled coffee grounds. In a blog post, the company explains how it extracts the oils from coffee grounds, cleanses them and grinds them down into micro-particles. The high-pressure, low-temperature process is less energy-intensive than the high-pressure, high-heat environment needed to create synthetic fabrics. The grounds are then mixed with recycled synthetic material to create a technical fabric.

Inyang believes Elemental’s coffee shirts would be ideal to outfit C-suite level executives, boutique hotels, smaller banks or a “company that wants to really go for that eco-friendly vibe.”

The shirts are readily available, with more stock on the way. Currently, Elemental carries three colors: white, light blue and graphite. “We tried to come up with fun coffee names for them, but it didn’t work out,” Inyang notes. “We had flat white for the white shirt, and then we’re like what do we do with the blue and the gray?”

Going forward, Elemental expects to add more colors to the dress shirt line, and is looking into adding other sustainable apparel and accessories to its product lineup. “We know there are bigger players out there; we’re not naïve to this,” Inyang says. “So, we’re kind of being strategic in how we’re releasing things, but there will definitely be more to come.”

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