this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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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.
Was that before or after going to the bank, laughing?
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.
Interesting!
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.
Nespresso has ones that are fully metal, and so can be shredded and separated by mass to get scrap aluminum and prime compost fodder. They accept them back by mail.
What the hell is a K-cup, it sounds like something you shove up your vaj
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. ๐ฆ๐ฆ๐ฆ
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.
Imagine never reading any news or discussions about environmental impact, but coming in here trying to defend Keurig by doing full whataboutism.
Plastic bottles weren't invented in the 21st century
Nah that's a diva cup
Don't give anyone ideas.
Too late!
Keurigs are actually pretty convenient when you're only making one cup. The trick is to get one of the reusable filters and just use whatever coffee you like.
I love my Keurig, but I always use the reusable mesh cups.
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 now fully recycled (as long as it's opened/not sealed)
It was a massive problem. Keurig did their due diligence and took care of it, significantly.
I promise I'm not a shill. I worked for Keurig and quit my first day because I got yelled at for bleeding on the product when a kcup cut my finger. I don't like Keurig. I don't use kcups.
But your sentiment isn't as valid as it once was. Theyve improved.
Interesting, did not know this.
They actually re-use the plastic? For more cups? As in, full cyclic product? That's pretty damn cool!
I still think something like the systems from Philips (excuse the german) or CoffeeB that do not need plastic in the first place for their single-serving pods is superior, but it's cool that plastic recycling can now do this instead of having to heavily push recycled plastic downstream to other use cases where less quality is needed.
That has been their claim for a few years now, yeah.
That's good to hear that they took steps to make kcups recyclable. It's a whole other conversation if plastic recycling isn't pretty useless in of itself. I too don't use kcups, hell I don't even drink coffee. Thanks for the information!
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.
They're 100% recyclable. It's also very cheap.
Again, possible to recycle does not mean they are actually recycled or economic to recycle. Many things are possible to recycle. Most are not. If their form factor or material makes them costly to recycle, they wont be. You say they are cheap. What cost to make new? What cost to collect, sort and recycle?
100% biodegradable would be better. With no plastic.
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.
...okay. And? That's like 2 seconds of work.
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.