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With the points on my bankcard, I racked up enough to get a $100 gift card from Amazon. Hmmm...I needed something I would never normally buy for myself. With Hubby's input- we decided on this:
Then one glorious day it came in the mail along with a 'starter pack' of coffee k-cups. Ummm...what do you do with those cups after you have your perfect mug of coffee brewed? There was no way that I could throw them in the trash. Could you imagine all that plastic being thrown away? Nope, a plan had to be formulated. If we were to have convenience- there was a price to pay. And Hubby knows he has to follow the rules when they are crunchy rules. I also have a reusable k-cup, which is awesome but I like variety with my coffee. So this is for the pre-filled k-cups.
A bowl was set up next to the beautiful coffeemaker for catching used cups.
1. Dump cups in sink:
4. Rinse the coffee out. Depending on how much time I have, sometimes I dump the coffee into a container and add to my compost but today, it just got rinsed:
5. Pull up the paper filter inside and just yank to rip it out and put in your trash bin along with the foil:
6. Be careful- I haven't figured out the pattern yet but some of the cups have a little plastic filter inside. They are between the cup and the filter. Make sure you don't accidentally rinse those down the drain. (Speaking from experience):
~~Joy
Copyright (c) 2012 Joy-Jasmin Brunnelson
All Rights Reserved
6 comments:
You know, I never even thought about recycling them. Wow. That is a lot of plastic!
(I do use the reusable cup more often though, as the kcups are a bit pricey...)
Wow, what a lot of excess packaging. I've never thought of buying anything like this before. It seems extemely wasteful. My husband and I enjoy coffee in different strengths too, but we are able to make a half pot at a time and take our own brew along with us in a thermos.
I understand that it works for you, though. It probably is much better than purchasing coffee one cup at a time at a coffee shop.
I don't see recycling as a great thing when it would have been better to avoid the purchase of wasteful products to begin with.
Dear Anonymous,
You are right. It is something that I just didn't think through before the purchase. Logistically, I wasn't thinking about how the k-cups were made before they came in. I am not perfect. I just made the best out of the situation that I have, which is to recycle them! I use a reusable k-cup, which is no different than a traditional coffee maker (paper filter and coffee grounds). The reusable is definitely the greener option and what we will use going forward rather than the disposable ones but I need to exhaust the current k-cup supply. This was my way to get people who have the same machine to stop and think about reducing the trash and recycling in areas they wouldn't have thought of before. It's baby steps into thinking in a new way! :)
You are right. My comment sounded much more judgmental than I meant it to. It's still a better option than some, and the reusable cup would be no worse than a normal coffee maker -in fact slightly better, as it uses no filters.
Anonymous- I appreciate that but no worries, I definitely took it that you are passionate about being mindful about our choices and how it affects Mama Earth. And we all need to be! We all have to be accountable and so I appreciate your honesty! You actually got me thinking about starting a campaign to make fully compostable k-cups!!! It's all good!
I've been using our k-cups as plant starting pots, even leaving a little coffee grounds in them when adding soil seems to really make the plants happy, and the cups already have that handy drainage hole in them, too ;) I also use egg shells for this purpose.
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