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Top-level
 @sinituulia I have to assume it’s because by “coffee” they don’t mean drip or basic espresso drinks that you make at home, but one of Starbuck’s special “coffee”-adjacent drinks. Home “brewing” has turned into this nasty environmental disaster that is Keurig cups. Barf. 19 comments
 @Ailbhe @renwillis They *could* be composted or recycled, but are not, because it would be expensive and fiddly and require much more work, and there's much more precious and time sensitive things to compost and recycle. It's just a marketing gimmick. And I'd prefer they'd make some kind of basic cup of coffee at home, with some sweetener and blanching if they so please... And then pick up the fancy thing on their way to wherever they're actually going, instead of driving back and forth while half awake! @Ailbhe @renwillis There is a startling amount of people who don't even sort their trash! It all goes in the same bin. And then sometimes, the municipality puts it in the same big bin (landfill) even if you've sorted it at home, especially in the US where most of the budget goes into maintaining roads and parking lots or so I've been led to believe. @sinituulia @Ailbhe Yeah. Especially in the states. Barely anything is ever composted. At best, the cups are tossed in the recycling bin in the house in vain hopes that someone is recycling it down the line. Which they rarely are. @renwillis @sinituulia oh. The non-compostable ones are aluminium here and that definitely gets recycled, unlike glass. It's one of the easy ones. I suspect home composting is more common here too. I haven't bought any aluminium ones so I don't know what other packaging they come with, but my pod machine came with an emptier-and-squasher for handling them. @sinituulia @Ailbhe @renwillis also note that Keurig specifically tried to make coffee pods with RFID chips in them to force people to buy their extra-expensive pods, which would make them ewaste even if the rest of the pod was compostable @sinituulia "Recyclable" is not the same as "recycled". It's the last of the three Rs for a reason. It's a future promise on sustainability that we can externalize somewhere else, for convenience. Convenience is what makes people use drive-throughs.  @Ailbhe @econads @renwillis @sinituulia (my coffee pods vanish in my compost bin quite quickly, especially if someone stirs it occasionally) @Ailbhe @econads @renwillis @sinituulia "biodegradable plastics" and "bioplastics" aren't the same thing, the plastic bags that were a big deal in the UK 20 years ago were made of quite different materials from the compostable things now. If you put anything in a "biodegradable" bag in the attic, it's surrounded by a pile of tiny fragile flakes now. And if anything compost heaps preserve them. @econads So if the precursors of that material are fossil in nature, we get more emissions. @renwillis @sinituulia I wonder how a coffee capsule compares to driving a few miles in terms of environmental impact?  @guigsy @renwillis @sinituulia It's not just driving a few miles, it's also still getting coffee there, presumably in a disposable cup. I think anything at home is better, even if it's capsule. @renwillis @sinituulia i have a ‘koffiemaatje’ it makes me a lungo at work. I drink decaf, at my work i can t have decaf from ten coffeemachine , now i have my own brewery.. it works well. |
Gregory's Server
@renwillis @sinituulia I had to Google those but they look like the coffee pods you can get in the UK -- often for Nespresso branded machines -- which are recyclable or compostable. Do I assume they use something grim to make them?