Your addiction to single-serve coffee pods might be harming the environment
Single-serving coffee pods like Keurig's K-Cups are having a moment. Nearly one in five adults makes a single-cup-brewed coffee every day, and the industry is now worth several billion dollars. The industry's popularity shouldn't come as a surprise, since coffee pods are simple to make and easy to clean. But, as Mother Jones reports, the cost of convenience might not outweigh the toll the cups are taking on the environment.
The magazine writes that since each pod is individualized and easy to trash, "you must also exponentially increase the packaging — packaging that ultimately ends up in landfills." And the pieces "aren't that easy to recycle either," it adds.
Mother Jones estimated that the 8.3 billion K-Cups produced by Green Mountain are enough to wrap around the equator 10.5 times — and that's just in 2013. More alarmingly, since only five percent of the cups are recyclable, the rest of the pieces end up in landfills. Read the rest of the story at Mother Jones.
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Jordan Valinsky is the lead writer for Speed Reads. Before joining The Week, he wrote for New York Observer's tech blog, Betabeat, and tracked the intersection between popular culture and the internet for The Daily Dot. He graduated with a degree in online journalism from Ohio University.
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