New 'sprouting' Recoffee shampoo made from 16 cups of coffee

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Does your empty shampoo bottle grow into a tree? O'right's Tree in the Bottle is the first shampoo to do just that.



It features a biodegradable bottle — the first of its kind, according to the company — made from a plastic-like starch, which is processed from fruit, plant and vegetable waste. Once you have finished with the shampoo, then plant the empty bottle. Each bottle comes preloaded with tree seeds in a plug at the bottom of the bottle, and in a matter of months, the bottle will biodegrade and the seeds inside will sprout up into a tree.



What's more, the Taiwan-based green enterprise O'right has recently introduced Recoffee, a shampoo made from 16 cups of ground coffee. O'right produced shampoo and hair-conditioning products by extracting the oil from recycled coffee grounds collected from Starbucks and other coffee shops in Taiwan.



According to O'right founder and chairperson, Steven Ko, 14,000 cups of coffee are consumed around the world every second, which results in a total of 22 million kilograms of discarded coffee grounds every year. Each liter of Recoffee shampoo uses the coffee grounds from 16 medium cups of coffee. To be exact, 16 cups of medium-sized Starbucks coffee produce about 320 grams of coffee grounds, but only 5 grams of coffee oil can be extracted from these coffee grounds. The extracted coffee oil must then be further processed before it is added into a formula to produce 1,000 milliliters of Recoffee shampoo, the company stated.



Recoffee shampoo's biodegradable bottle base also doubles as a planter for coffee seedlings. Like all of O'right's Tree in the Bottle products, the Recoffee bottle can be buried in the ground and will eventually grow into a new coffee tree.



Home to the first GMP-certified green cosmetics plant in Asia, the company manufactures all of its products using 100% solar and wind energy, along with waste-water-management systems that enable the reuse of water resources, the company stated.



O'right has developed more than 110 products. It also has more than 200 employees, and it counts 10,000 salons in 20 countries as its clients.