Students have designed an amazing new afterlife for our leftover coffee grounds.
If coffee makes your mornings way better, just look at what your leftover coffee grounds can do.
For many of us, coffee is essentially magic.
You buy it, you brew it, you drink it — it never lets you down. You get that nice little caffeine buzz going, and you're instantly launched into "I can do anything!" mode.
But have you ever thought about where your leftover coffee grounds go when you're done with them?
Some people compost; others choose the trash. Or, you know, some people find ways to save lives with their grounds.
Students from the University of Toronto are using coffee grounds to create an alternative to firewood for women and children in refugee camps.
Those coffee grounds you had from last week = a burnable log that helps kids? Yes. It's called Moto.
The Moto log! Image via Moto, used with permission.
Moto's aim is to eliminate women and children from having to leave their campsites to search for firewood in what can be dangerous situations. In refugee camps, women and children are known to walk many miles very early in the morning to find enough flammable materials to cook breakfast. This puts them at high exposure of the risk of rape and sexual attack from local militia and men living near their camps, according to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
With Moto, they won't have to travel at all.
"As soon as they're out of the camp, they're unsafe and that leaves them open to assault," Sam Bennett, one of the founders of Moto, told CBC Toronto. "[Moto] prevents the dangers associated with that, but also frees women up to spend time doing other things, whether that's trying to find another source of revenue or spending time educating their kids."
Looking for firewood. Image via Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images.
So, how exactly do coffee grounds become fuel?
A team of MBA and engineering students from the University of Toronto came up with a simple recipe: They made a burnable log by mixing dried-out coffee grounds, paraffin wax, and sugar and baking it in a loaf pan. That's it!
According to CBC Toronto, the team is currently getting coffee grounds from three participating coffee chains in the local area. But they'll be looking for a major partnership when they scale up in size.
Right now, the logs can burn for nearly 90 minutes and can be used for cooking, heating — pretty much anything firewood can do. The team hopes to increase the length of burn time in future versions of the product.
Moto founders: Matthew Frehlich, Sam Bennett, Lucy Yang, Gowtham Ramachandran, and Lucas Siow.
The simplicity of the logs shows promise for its future, and they did that on purpose so the logs eventually can be produced locally.
In addition to helping keep women and children safer, Moto helps protect the local firewood supply (aka trees!).
There's rampant deforestation in and around refugee camps that we rarely hear about. The UNHCR points to how wood consumption in camps is greatly exceeding what nature is capable of replenishing — and that puts everyone in danger.
With Moto, they won't have to rely only on wood.
Image via iStock.
These burnable logs have the potential to decrease waste, help reduce hunger, protect forests, and keep women and kids safer.
They can create less food waste by reusing coffee grounds and help the environment by eliminating the need to cut down trees. The logs reduce hunger because they can be used as fuel for cooking and provide warmth and light in unstable areas. And they open up more opportunities for women and children, empowering them and keeping them safer.
It's truly a full-circle approach at making the world better — and one that we can all play a role in.
Though they're not at the level of commercial production yet, the Moto team will compete for the Hult Prize in March 2017, a global competition with a first-place prize of $1 million to continue their social venture and ensure Moto's presence in sub-Saharan African refugee camps. Good luck to them; they're onto something big.
How cool is it to think that the coffee you're already drinking every day could be used to help someone cook dinner for their family on the other side of the world?
A Generation Jones teenager poses in her room.Image via Wikmedia Commons
An office kitchen.via 
An angry man eating spaghetti.via 
Gif of baby being baptized
Woman gives toddler a bath Canva
An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
- YouTube youtube.com
Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.