QORE: Circularity at the Core

Every cup of coffee leaves something behind: the grounds, and the chaff, the papery skin that flakes off beans as they roast. Most of it goes in the bin. At Alchemist Arab Street, it has become part of the room. Some of the surfaces around you are made partly from coffee chaff, and this month the company that made them has taken over the whole building to show you how.

QORE is a circular-materials maker from Thailand, and this free pop-up is its first showing anywhere outside it. Its whole idea is that going green should not mean settling for less: waste only gets a second life if what it becomes is good enough to want, so its panels and furniture have to look good and last. In three years it has diverted more than 50 tonnes of waste that way.

The showcase fills all three floors of Alchemist’s conservation shophouse until 31 October, and it reads best from the bottom up: from the waste, to the material, to the things made from it.

Level 1: start with a coffee

Order at the counter and look around while you wait. The café’s own fit-out uses 65 QORE sheets, which between them kept about 1.22 tonnes of material out of landfill, including 120kg of coffee chaff and 600kg of recycled plastic. The exhibition begins in the room you are already standing in.

Level 2: waste becomes material

Upstairs, the raw ingredients sit beside the panels they become. Every QORE panel starts from a recycled-plastic base mixed with a waste stream: coffee chaff, flakes of recycled PET, food-packaging plastic, or seasonal farm waste. Some come out plain, some speckled like terrazzo, some in solid colour. A solid panel is more than 80% recycled material, and each square metre is roughly 6kg less waste in landfill.

The same floor shows the panels at work: the fit-outs QORE has made for Alchemist here and in Da’an, and for Charoen Pokphand Foods back in Thailand.

The stool everyone will want

The piece most people leave talking about is the Betterism Stool, made only for this collaboration. It works as a seat or a side table, packs flat and stacks. The seat comes in three roast shades: light, medium and dark, holding 5%, 10% and 15% coffee chaff. Each seat accounts for about 1.5kg of diverted waste, including up to 225g of chaff, roughly what roasting coffee for 400 cups leaves behind.

Only 119 exist, numbered 001 to 119, at $128 each. Pick your shade on Level 2 and pay at the counter on Level 1, or order online at Alchemist.global while stocks last.

Level 3: how it is made

The top floor shows the process behind the panels. On Saturdays it also hosts a coffee and plant-care workshop with Alchemist and the plant studio Soilboy, where your own coffee grounds go into the soil of a plant you take home. It is listed separately.

Why go

It is free, it takes half an hour, and you get a good coffee out of it. Design lovers will want to touch every sample on the tables; everyone else will leave looking at their own coffee cup differently.

It is also about the easiest way there is to do your part. Nobody is asking you to give anything up: sit on a stool that kept 1.5kg out of landfill, take home a plant potted in your own coffee grounds, or simply know where your daily cup can end up. Make it part of an afternoon around Kampong Glam, and if a stool catches your eye, do not wait: there are only 119 of them.