Coffee pods and K-Cups, in particular, are widely used by coffee drinkers all across the globe. After all, why wouldn’t they be? Coffee pods are a fast and painless way to brew your coffee and get that much-needed caffeine kick. If you’re not all that concerned about taste and texture, K-cups and other types of coffee pods are bound to make your life easier.
However, there’s a dark side to K-cups – something that most people don’t actively think about. We’re talking of course about the enormous plastic and aluminium waste that they produce. Each year, Keurig (the company that produces K-cups) sells several billion of them. That’s a lot of plastic! In fact, if you line up the number of K-cups sold in a single year, you could wrap it around the earth about a dozen times or so!
There are significant consequences to producing this much plastic waste and in this article, we’re going to dive into the details.
Making Ground Coffee vs. Making Coffee Pods
The lifecycle of regular ground coffee is eco-friendly for the most part. First of all, once the coffee cherries are ripe enough, they’re harvested and the beans are processed and roasted. Afterwards, the roasted coffee beans are packaged and sold to the customer, who grinds them and brews coffee from the grounds.
Every item involved in this life cycle is recyclable, except for the packaging. For instance, the grounds that are leftover can be used for composting and even the paper filter is eventually broken down. On the other hand, the coffee pod manufacturing process involves a lot of plastic and aluminium. While brewing with pods does help you save water, electricity, and coffee, these savings aren’t nearly enough to offset for the enormous amount of plastic waste generated.
While technically, you could recycle plastic and aluminium, this is quite a time-consuming process. In reality, most K-cups and other coffee pods end up in landfills.
The Decomposing Period of a K-Cup
If you’re thinking: ‘well, they’ll decompose in a few years anyway’, that’s simply not the case. It is estimated that K-cups will take about 100 to 150 years to fully decompose. This is because around 95% of it is made of a plastic composite that can’t be recycled. This composite is actually comprised of four layers of plastic which help keep the coffee inside fresh for a long time. The trade-off is that it keeps them from decomposing for an entire century.
Hence, essentially, K-cups keep piling up in our landfills with nowhere to go.
The Impact on Human Health
We know now that the K-cup is disastrous to our environment but what about its impact on our own health? Well, there isn’t any good news in terms of that either.
For starters, all K-Cups come fitted with aluminium tops. A lot of people don’t know this but it is hazardous to your health to eat food that has come into contact with aluminium. According to research, aluminium has been linked with conditions like depression, autoimmune diseases, and even autism.
It’s common knowledge that consuming food that has come into contact with plastic can cause illnesses. Studies performed over the years have found that harmful chemicals can rub off plastic containers and leak into the contents.
In the case of K-cups, you’re not just ingesting coffee that has touched plastic but heated plastic as well! If anything, that would increase the rate at which chemicals are leached into the coffee.
What exactly do these chemicals do? They can put you at risk of experiencing weight gain, hormonal issues and even problems with fertility.
The Bottom Line?
K-cups are quite bad for your health too.
What Can You Do About It?
If you’ve spent a lot of money on a single-serve coffee machine (like a Keurig), then it can seem unwise to just throw it out. After all, you may like the ease-of-use and the features that come with your coffee maker. Fortunately, there’s a way to use your machine in a more eco-friendly way: with K cups that can be reused.
While most reusable K-cups are also made of plastic, the difference is that you don’t have to keep throwing them away. Hence, less waste is generated. Now imagine if everyone switched to reusable cups. We’d end up reducing billions of plastic scraps every year!
In addition, it will force you to adapt better coffee drinking habits. You’ll have to keep buying your own coffee grounds, which means that you’ll likely come across more delicious roasts and bean strains. Last but not least, you’ll also save a ton of money when you don’t have to keep buying new pods every week.
In Conclusion
There’s no denying that K-cups and other coffee pods are disastrous to the environment. They produce mind-boggling quantities of plastic waste every year, causing landfills to get bigger and bigger. In addition, they’re also detrimental to our health because of the aluminium and plastic content.
One way to counter this enormous generation of waste is to brew coffee with reusable K-cups. Not only are they more eco-friendly but they also cut costs and encourage coffee drinkers to pay more attention to the brewing process.
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