When Craft Coffee Roaster moved from its original location in Tai Kok Tsui to a new space just down the street, designer Keith Chan Shin-hing was hired to kit out the airy, high-ceilinged interiors.

“It’s very straightforward,” says Chan of the minimalist space, whose mixture of metallic greys and warm wood keeps the focus on the gleaming coffee equipment at the bar. “The owner, Lok Chan, is a very humble guy. We wanted to reflect that, which is why we used just a few materials.”

One of those materials? Spent coffee grounds, used to create a long grey bench that faces a floor-to-ceiling window. It’s impossible to tell by looking at it that it is made from coffee, but a curious customer might remark on its unusual, grainy texture – a kind of designer’s Easter egg hidden amid the cafe’s sleek interiors.

Because Lok Chan sources his beans directly from farms in Africa and Latin America, and roasts them himself, Keith Chan wanted to create something that echoed Craft Coffee Roaster’s farm-to-cup ethos. “Because he’s so low profile, Lok didn’t want a sign explaining it, but if you feel the texture, you might have questions,” says Chan. “And once you know, you know.”

It’s a small, subtle experiment, but one that represents a growing movement among Hong Kong designers to reuse waste materials in unexpected ways. Things that would have otherwise been discarded are finding their way into furniture and interior finishes that don’t immediately come across as having been repurposed.

This gesture towards sustainability is particularly notable in a city that sends an average 15,637 tonnes of waste to landfills every day. It’s also a design challenge that could lead towards reuse becoming the norm rather than the exception.

“Waste isn’t a material failure,” says Jacqueline Chak Hai-yee, a founding partner of Editecture, a design studio that strives for zero waste. “Someone, somewhere designed that plastic bottle to be used for 10 minutes and last for 500 years. We see that as an unfinished brief.”