I also second social media, but I need to make another suggestion it’d be Keurigs k-cups. So much plastic waste for the barest level of convenience.
Even the creator of the K-cup said he regretted creating it because of the environmental impact.
Actually, the inventor of the Keurig coffee pod system, John Sylvan, sold his ownership of the product for $50,000 in 1997. 7 years after founding the company and before single-serve coffee really took off.
Thank you for beating me to mention this.
K-cups are really amazinlgy bad. And it’s not like there aren’t much better solutions available. Philips has those fully bio-degradable pads, a local store now sells a type of coffee maker that uses just the coffee powder in balls where the outer shell is compressed grounds that is cracked open to get to the powder inside.
But no, Keurig and their fucking oceans of plastic waste.
It’s a small plastic cup full of ground coffee, Kuerig machines use them. They generated a ton of plastic waste, since each k-cup was a single use.
There was great progress in compostable K-Cups from other vendors. And then Keurig did the DRM thing with the UV ink. So they literally made everything worse trying to keep their market reach.
I threw mine out and went back to a french press. Straight into compost, and the coffee tastes better.
And so is every Coke bottle with 5 times the plastic. And so is every store-bought coffee. Yet… silence. 🦗🦗🦗
What about bottles? Far more energy requires to melt and pour glass. No one says a word about single use.
Never found a K-cup on the beach or trail, but I pack plastic bags to haul trash and sometimes load 2 or 3.
Yes, it’s a waste, but the whole thing was blown way the hell out of proportion.
I hike, kayak, canoe, whatever, all over the place. Every plastic bottle I pick up contains, what, 5 times the plastic? I pick up a LOT. And nobody thinks twice or raises a fuss.
We use a Keurig, but either with plastic refill cups or paper bags my wife brings home from the hotel.
K-cups are recyclable. Why are you people not putting them in the recycling.
A lot of stuff marked as recyclable is technically recyclable but cost prohibitive to do so. I don’t know what type of plastic these cups are, but when they claim recyclable, it should specify percent actually being recycled.
I’m liking aldi at the moment. They list all the separate parts of packaging for me and how it can be disposed. I hope its just a step to moving more to biodegradable rather than recyclable.
To be used in most recycling programs you would need to fully remove the foil lid, and rinse out every k-cup before depositing them in recycling.
Strong dissagree. I am barely functional pre-caffeine in the early morning. A Keurig is about as much mental energy as I can muster to operate. It is a godsend to me on day I work early.
I think the problem is not in pod-based single-serving coffee machines. Those are common, and well-loved for a reason.
But there are easily available alternatives that do the exact same thing without requiring so much plastic, namely Senseo coffee pads (they’re grounds in coffee filter paper) or CoffeeB and its compressed coffee grounds balls (so it’s all just coffee ground, both the coffee and the pod). Probably a fair few more I don’t know about personally.
Possibly even Nestle with their Nescafe pods. They’re aluminium but some countries achieve effectively 100% recycling on that, then the only issue is the filter membrane they place inside and I don’t know whether that is easily separated during recycling or not.
