Banning Coffee Pods

Over the past decade, single-serve coffee pods have quickly become a favorite method for delivering a hot cup o’ joe as fast and efficiently as possible.  The explosive growth of pod-based coffee machines is such that now nearly one in three American homes has one.

Estimates are that if all the coffee pods sold in one year were placed end-to-end, they would circle the globe not once – but more than ten times!  Nearly all of the pods are neither recyclable nor biodegradable, and more than 10 billion of these things end up in landfills annually.

A typical coffee pod contains three grams of waste for every six grams of coffee, and users can end up paying as much as $40 a pound for their java. The pod itself is a complicated object containing a specialized plastic and a foil top.  Recycling it would require a complicated deconstruction process to separate out the plastic, metal and paper components.

In Germany, the city of Hamburg has taken a major step toward eliminating this waste.  The city has banned coffee pods from government-run buildings, saying it will no longer spend taxpayer money on products that don’t meet its sustainability standard.  They city also banned plastic cutlery and plates, as well as water, beer, and soft drinks in disposable packaging.  The objective is to “increase the share of environmentally friendly products significantly in order to help combat climate change.”

It’s time more of us follow the German example by forgoing a little of the convenience for the sake of sustainability.  After all, how hard is it really to brew a pot of coffee?

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This German city just banned coffee pods

Photo, posted February 20, 2011, courtesy of Aaron via Flickr.

‘Banning Coffee Pods’ from Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.