Heatswell: Coffee Cup with Pop-Up Insulating Collar

Now here's a clever idea. To replace the disposable drink collar on coffee cups (one more piece of cardboard to throw away or recycle), Scott Amron created a cup with a built-in sleeve that swells like magic to protect your hand.

The cup replaces the cup/sleeve duo so ubiquitous in coffee shops and restaurants, and is still biodegradable and recyclable.

We hope that our favorite coffee shop switches to this design -- we'd love to see it in action!

• See more: Heatswell from Amron Experimental

(Image: Amron Experimental)

Comments (4)

...or people can bring travel mugs when they go to coffee shops...

Here in Seattle, most coffee shops ask you if you want your drink for here or to go, and if it's for here they give you an actual coffee cup to drink it out of. More places should do that! This cup is a nice idea for take-out coffee, though, for people that haven't remembered their travel mugs.

Curious what he used to fill the cup because as you can see about halfway through the film the liquid begins permeating the cup. This normally doesn't happen with paper cups and coffee.

I saw this a week ago on a gadget site but what irked me about it is how this got gobbled up by people online when its pretty much useless right now and in a beyond early stage! If you look close at the video, the guy is pouring OIL in the cup. So scalding hot, way hotter than normal boiling water, cooking oil. That ain't tea like it looks. You can tell cause after a second, the paper of the cup gets saturated by the oil. So on no normal scale of drinkable temps does it work, let alone the fact that the camera tried to cut off the liquid once its in the cup cause it turns GREEN. The dye and material used for the fancy wrap seeped all into the liquid. Gross.

I get its an early design, and granted I watched the test clip without sound so maybe they explain it, but this is a silly idea that I hate when they do these concept things, people leap up and down running to the store to get it while they may be a decade away from it being possible.