Is it really worth filling up a
landfill to avoid making your own coffee?
I
know I shouldn’t be, but I am shocked by Americans’ laziness.
We
look for the closest parking spot to the gym so that we don’t have to walk
those extra few steps. We indulge in watching more cooking shows, yet actually
cook less than ever. We invented the drive-thru.
Now,
nearly one in five American coffee drinkers is too lazy to make
coffee.
There
are foods that are very complex and difficult to make. Coffee isn’t one of
them. I understand why someone wouldn’t want to make homemade butter or those little
French macaroons. I get why my mom only made her cheese blintzes for
very special occasions. That stuff takes work.
But,
coffee?
I
make it several times a day. And I’m pretty lazy — I’ve been known to eat whole
unpeeled carrots Bugs Bunny style to avoid cutting and cooking them. If I can
make coffee, anyone can.
A
traditional drip coffee maker requires a few steps. Add water. Measure coffee.
Grind coffee. Add filter. Place grounds in filter. Press “on.” Wait. Your
coffee is ready.
You
can further reduce the required work by purchasing pre-ground coffee, or –
better yet –getting a coffee grinder that does the
measuring for you.
For
lots of folks, that’s still too much work.
Nearly
20 percent of coffee drinkers now use coffee pods.
With specialized coffee makers and compatible “pods” of individual serving
sizes of pre-ground coffee, one reduces the task of making coffee to: Add
water, insert pod, press start, throw pod away. Fancier machines also let you
add milk to make various espresso drinks.
These
newfangled coffeemakers don’t come cheap. A Keurig will run you $80 or more, and Nespresso
makers start at $149.
Once you’re invested, you have to buy the related brand of pods — K-cups for
Green Mountain Coffee’s Keurig or Nestle’s Nespresso. That alone would be my
deal-breaker, because I don’t like either brand of coffee.
In
their defense, Keurig offers a refillable pod for $15 (the
price of my entire coffee maker) so you can add your preferred type of coffee.
Which puts the onerous work of measuring and grinding back into your
coffee-making process.
While
it’s easy to make fun of Americans’ drive to save time in the kitchen, there’s
nothing inherently wrong with it. In fact, sometimes time-saving steps
constitute efficiency and ingenuity, not laziness. But in this case, the new
pod systems result in a staggering amount of waste and may potentially harm
your health.
According
to a recent Mother
Jones article, all of the K-cups sold in 2013 could circle
the earth 10.5 times. And every single one now resides in a landfill.
Nespresso’s pods are aluminum. They have a program to collect and
recycle used pods, but unless their customers actually take them up
on this, it’s little more than good PR.
Then
there are the health questions generated by making your coffee in little
plastic pods (in the case of K-cups). The cups are made of #7 plastic, a catch-all category
of “Other” plastics not included in numbers 1 through 6. Keurig refused to tell Mother
Jones what type of plastic it used, or whether or not it contained
possibly-carcinogenic styrene.
These
new brewing systems are little more than a clever method a few companies have
discovered to sell more of their own crappy coffee, without regard for the
trash they create and their potential impacts on their customers’ health.
Let’s
take the waste and potential health hazards out of our coffee. We don’t need to
trash the planet just to get a morning buzz.
OtherWords columnist
Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe
for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.
OtherWords.org