Keurig and other coffee pods are piling up in landfills. These K-cups are made of a plastic shell, lined with a paper filter and topped with aluminum. Although separately these components are recyclable, when they are put together they can only be trashed.
It’s believed that if you collect all the single-use coffee pods sold by market leader Keurig in a year and line them up, you’d circle the whole Earth more than 12 times.
In order to reduce waste, the German city of Hamburg has banned single-use coffee pods from all state-run buildings.
Jan Dube from the Hamburg Department of the Environment and Energy told the press, “These portion packs cause unnecessary resource consumption and waste generation, and often contain polluting aluminium. The capsules can’t be recycled easily because they are often made of a mixture of plastic and aluminium. It’s 6 grams of coffee in 3 grams of packaging. We in Hamburg thought that these shouldn’t be bought with taxpayers’ money.”
Hamburg’s officials are taking great initiative by making their city an example, and bringing awareness to its people about how wasteful these coffee pods can be.
