To be fair, there is a reusable filter available for the Keurig machines. But I agree that the K-cups made from plastic are a bad idea!

Sign me up for this one. Press pots rock - great coffee, no filter. I was particularly offended when Green Mountain adopted this technology. Another example of people choosing convenience at the expense of ecology.

Keurig--is that the maker responsible for those "K-cup" machines?

I was bedazzled by the multitudes of flavors and bright colors of the K-cup displays just inside the entrance of Bed, Bath, and Beyond, but didn't investigate further. I figured that anything that brews single cups was pure, unmitigated hedonism.

When I want a single cup of coffee there's always the dark-roasted Taster's Choice. Love it. And a canister goes quite a long way and gets recycled besides.

The boss just bought us one at work this week...there goes my weekly pail of UCGs. :-(

Lloyd

Oh, no!

I'm sorry Lloyd. :(

It is a challenge trying to find enough food waste to satisfy one's composting operations, especially if you have them going on multiple fronts.

I'm thinking of approaching a couple food establishments locally, especially a caf� that serves nice coffees, baked goods and eclectic sandwiches. Surely some other obsessive composter has already tapped their food wastes, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

Couldn't agree more. Didn't know there was a re-usable, will look into that. There is a machine in my house, entirely not my doing.

I don't think they advertise the reusable filter very hard, and it's easy to see why. If you price out the coffee in those K-cups it's about $25/lb. That's where they make their money. Same place Kodak used to make theirs: not on the machine, but the supplies.

I saw a show about this thing, sales are skyrocketing. They make umpteen billion of the darn things per year (and growing).

Who drinks just one cup of coffee?
I like a whole pot, fewer lines & it does not last long with 5 or more drinker.
A friend just got 1100 pounds of coffee waste for his 25 X 40 garden & all his flower beds.

I don't have to do this, but I will step forward and admit that I have and use one of these.

I was resistant at first, but my wife really wanted one (her mom has one) and then we received one as a gift.

BUT - I religiously empty the UCGs out of everyone K-cup and compost them.

I know that doesn't make it right, but it is something, right?

$25/lb just for the product, which doesn't account for the hidden costs of unnecessary petroleum use, and the as yet unknown of how those little plastic cups and strips of foil will make their presence felt in the future - I'm sure they're accumulating in the great Pacific Garbage Whirlpool as we write.

Here is a link that might be useful: Plastic time-bomb

I just ran across an article about a one-cup wonder which might satisfy the Keurig crowd and be much more environmentally acceptable. If it's like the old one, there's no filter and the grounds can be scraped out and composted.

Claire

If you can't access the NY Times online site, it's the Moka Alessi.

Claire

When I looked at the website for Keurig they show a ceramic mug very clearly being used. I think one could just compost the premade filter packs with the coffee. I don't know that much about them. I would rather make coffee this way. You soak the coffee in hot water and pour it into a tea strainer through a paper towel to act as a filter. It is much cheaper. Coffee makers always break quickly and fresh presses are just strainers for coffee.

One more thing - undrank (?) coffee accounts for A LOT of wasted water.

I'm sure that people on this forum feed cold coffee to their plants or their piles, but the larger public, those who ARE using K-Cups and who are NOT composting, are probably actually saving water.

Here is a link that might be useful: I'm not sayin, I'm just sayin...

The Keurig link posted above could be a textbook example of "greenwashing". They claim an environmental benefit, and disregard the problem that didn't exist prior to the technology. The problem of disposable cups isn't the result of brewing practices, it's behavioral. The water savings may over time prove to be of value, but that is only if there is an enormous adoption of this relatively expensive method of brewing. French press pots have no waste, are made from recyclable, durable materials, and can brew exactly the amount of coffee desired. Even the reusable filters require some on-going industrial process to create. If coffee was as much of a hot-button issue as breast cancer, this would be all over YouTube by now.

Yes, it's incredible the ingenious ways that corporate America creates and markets a new product, that is often entirely non-essential and people functioned perfectly fine without it, but it caters to human convenience (laziness) and quickly becomes "indispensible". Like K cups, or bottled water.

Anyway, the coffee used in those convenient 1-serving containers is mediocre. I prefer to buy small amounts of freshly ground organic coffee. I've got a couple of bodems, but mostly use the drip cone with a filter, and of course used grounds and filter go into the compost bucket .

I have seen the reusable cups, but I don't know anyone that uses them. I imagine the next step for them will be to make the K-cups out of a biodegradable plastic. They will call it "compostable" to placate us crazies. I have composted fish, whole rabbits, birds, squirrels, and other oddities and have a hard time finding any recognizable piece of them afterward. I can however pick out every little plastic oval orange label that goes through. I tried composting a "compostable" plastic air pillow that we use at work as void filler. After 12 months you could still read the writing on the plastic. It looked brand new. I gave up and threw it away. Composting "compostable" K-cups will litter gardens like egg shells for years to come. "Nice Daisies, oh and how was the Chai Latte flavor?"

Tropical: The waste problem is not about the cup that you drink out of. The K-cup we're speaking of is a small shot-glass sized disposable cup with a foil lid with coffee grounds inside. You put this into the machine and it pierces the foil and the cup and runs hot water through it to make a cup of coffee. The cup and grounds are then discarded. The selling point is convenience, "freshness" of the brew, and everyone can have their favorite flavor.

They'll come up with a bio-degradeable package soon. Made from patented GM corn. It will be grown in US under subsidy, manufactured in China, and banned in Europe, but diabetic Americans will buy so many that Keurigs' stock will out-pace Facebooks.

billme How true, how true.

Hi Lloyd. I can't imagine how you might have felt when your boss brought in that ridiculous coffee machine. He obviously is oblivious to the overall reasoning for your attempt to teach your co-workers how to compost. I'd be ticked.

if i only want 1 cup, i go to old standby the coffee press i found in a garage sale for .25. makes a great cup, as strong as i want, & the grounds recycle.
if your lucky enough, (like i am) you live in a small town, with a local coffee shop, & they save the coffee & tea grounds for you, & the owner loves it when i bring her a couple of tomatoes or a nice plump watermelon for her.

Bill, what do you think of those "bio-degradable" corn-based "plastics?"

I watched the videos on the floating burial grounds of plastic in the Pacific and was utterly horrified. I suppose that the corn-based products must have a better potential to break down.

When I researched how to compost those corn products, I remember that the temperatures had to get quite high to break them down. I tossed a couple into my big stump composting project, but since that's slow compost it probably won't get hot enough.

Your thoughts?

And etxdirtlady, there's a coffeeshop in my little town that I want to approach for that purpose. I just hope that someone hasn't beat me to it!

I love my Keurig pot! Who drinks one cup of coffee? Me, after I've already had a pot full. Or sometimes after dinner I want just a cup.

I don't use the disposable K-cups- too expensive. I use my own coffee in the reusable filter.

Never fear, Lloyd, you can pierce the disposable lid and scrape out grounds. I've done it.

Karen

I am not going to empty out every little cup! Not happening, no way.

:-)

Lloyd

I am opposed to the so called biodegradable plastics for a number of reasons. The primary one is that they are a highly fossil-fuel dependent product, both for growing the massive amounts of plants needed and for production and for the recycling. Most of them require high heat and moisture to properly biodegrade, otherwise they tend to merely crumble into smaller particulates that do not re-enter the biosphere in a way that contributes usable nutrients. Currently there are less than 100 communities nationwide that actively compost biodegradable plastic, and it is a problem in the waste stream because it is getting blended with recyclable petroleum-based plastics and ends up needing to be sorted, or it gets burned, creating methane by-products. Because of the specific plant characteristics required for biodegradable plastic, they are exclusively made from GEO plants, primarily corn and sorghum. I prefer not to support most of the large industries that control Genetic Engineering, because of the unresolved issues regarding cross pollination, heavy-handed dealings in court, and a lack of transparency and long-term biological and environmental testing. These GEO crops are raised with high petroleum practices, and significant amounts of synthetic inputs. There will be improvements in the future to address some of these issues, but re-usable is always best, recyclable is second best, and biodegradable is better than disposable, because the environmental impact of the manufacturing process increases each time. Re-usable lasts as long as it's cared for, recyclable and biodegradable still have significant presence in the waste stream and require further fuel inputs to process properly, and disposable, with the possible exception of toilet paper and the like, is just accommodating our demands for convenience. That's the short answer.

My kids wore cloth diapers, you probably aren't surprised.

The Great Pacific Garbage patch and the others like it are cause not just by plastics that don't degrade, but by littering. That stuff doesn't fly out of landfills and jump into the ocean. It's dropped on the ground and washed into the rivers, then the ocean. Not that biodegradable plastics won't help, they probably would, but littering is the real problem.