Leyi Wang

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My work centers on the wastefulness of Manhattan’s coffee culture, titled Echoes of the Grind, which implies a reflection on daily coffee consumption and its effects. Noticing that there are more than 3,705 coffee shops in NYC alone, with over 200 Starbucks on the island of Manhattan shocked me. Throughout the process from growing to coffee drinking, it goes through by over 15 steps, creating more than 20 kinds of wastes. Therefore the theme of my project is a proposal to use a pop-up monumental coffee shop museum to make the world aware of these materials and this phenomenon. The roof of the building is a coffee ground collecting installation, where people will poor in all coffee grounds that they have created after ordering a cup of coffee from the café. As time goes by, the coffee grounds will accumulate more and more, and people will slowly see how much “garbage” they have created, visualizing things that people don’t usually realize. The café will be decorated using coffee ground based sustainable materials in which they would be exhibited and introduced in the museum on the first floor. The coffee grounds collected during the pop-up would also be send into the process of recreating materials like those.