Coffee adds cool flavour to Austrian outdoor wear

Jun 17, 2010, 12:34 GMT

Vienna - An Austrian sportswear maker has come up with a new way to fight the summer heat using coffee - but not by drinking iced lattes.

Outdoor supplier Northland is offering clothes that include coffee grounds as a way to neutralize body odours.

The polo shirts and T-shirts that come in the colours Mocca and Latte are made of polyester fibres. Before the fibres are spun from plastic granules, a small amount of recycled coffee particles are added, Northland owner Arno Pichler explained.

'They have such a big surface that they absorb odours,' he said from the company headquarters in the town of Graz.

Northland's fabric supplier has a contract with a major coffee company where the grounds are collected after customers have had their dose of caffeine, Pichler said. He declined to name the coffee firm.

The family-owned company that is popular in Latin America and China started experimenting with unusual fabrics several years ago.

Like other companies, the outdoor firm makes clothing from bamboo fibres, which have antibacterial qualities and keep the body up to 2 degrees cooler than cotton. But the most important advantage of using young bamboo plants is that they have a much smaller ecological impact, Pichler said.

'Cotton needs extreme amounts of water and fertilizer. In contrast, bamboo grows like a weed,' he said.