A cup of coffee before a workout is always a good way to jump start the ole motor before pressin’, pullin’, bendin’, flippin’, kickin’, scratchin’, jazzercizin’, freestyle runningin’, or whatever your preferred form of physical activity may be. And now you can WEAR coffee during a workout—if women’s sportswear is your sartorial choice for getting active, that is—thanks to Rumi X, a company using recycled coffee grounds to make their sports bras and yoga pants.
According to Bustle (perhaps the most appropriately named news source to break such a story), the women’s activewear brand was created by Melissa Chu, a San Francisco-based former yoga instructor who “wanted to create sportswear that was environmentally responsible.” Each item of clothing in Chu’s line is made using 16 recycled plastic bottles. And of course coffee. Used coffee grounds get sent to a recycling facility, where they are stripped of their oils to remove the coffee smell (a good or a bad thing depending upon where you stand on smelling like coffee), shaped into pellets, and then made into thread.
More than just environmentally friendly, the use of coffee grounds in sportswear has quite a few practical benefits, according to the article. Thanks to the coffee, the fabric has three times more odor control than cotton or polyester. So while you won’t smell like coffee (again, not sure if that is a good or bad thing), you also won’t smell like an unkempt version of yourself. Additionally, the garments offer five times the UV protection of regular cotton thanks to coffee’s “numerous microscopic pores.”
Prices for the garments range from $40 to $80, which may be a lot, I’m not really sure; my workout attire consists primarily of shirts I purchased at the Salvation Army over a decade ago when I thought wearing thrift store t-shirts was ironic and cool (full disclosure: I still wear many of those shirts out in public, but more from inertia than because I think it’s cool).
For more information on the garments or the upcycling of coffee grounds process, check out Rumi X’s official website. And maybe leave them a note to ask for a still-coffee-smelling line.
Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network.
*top image via Rumi X
