The Single Use Kuerig

[AArdvark]

We got one of these coffee makers for Christmas. Initially I thought I would ignore it, or worse, hate it. Our main coffee maker until this point has a grinder in it and we have three or four different kinds ( of locally roasted! ) beans.
Well, since having this week off work I may be coming around because of the convenience factor. I usually brew a thermos and take that to work with me. Now it turns out I hardly drink coffee if I'm not at work because two cups a day is fine. Work is responsible for my caffeine addiction. Yeah, work. Not me. This single cup thingie is easy and quick so there must be a catch in it. I'm buying Green Mountain K cups from Vermont to be Eco-left-human.

[pinback]

They're great, but never tell anyone you have one, because you'll immediately get bombarded with fifty three micro-lectures about waste and pollution and how you're killing all the whales or some shit.

[AArdvark]

Just Googled this and got a zillion hits about landfills and ocean plastic. Since humans are the dominant species we can litter our world and all the sea creatures can go fuck off.

Sorry, only had one cup so far. Call me back after the second cup starts working.

[Flack]

The catch is the price and the effect on the environment -- and that's coming from a guy who regularly uses one. I used to have a Keurig sitting on my desk at work and every single time I fired it up someone would walk by and remind me that one of those K-cups costs more than an entire pot of coffee. They're not wrong. According to Google, a 30oz jug of Folgers coffee grounds ($8, Walmart) makes 240 cups of coffee, so that's less than a nickel per cup vs. 50(ish?) cents per K-cup. But as you know, sometimes you don't need a pot of coffee. Sometimes you just need a single cup.

Those same people at work constantly remind me that K-cups are made of plastic. They're not biodegradable. According to them, in another couple of years all landfills will just look like piles of K-cups -- plastic white mountains, off in the distance. These same people buy bottled water by the case and still use straws (the nerve!) but they have an app on their phone that can figure what percentage of the earth I've personally ruined based on my one or two cups of coffee a day. Some day in a field of dirt there will be a sign with my name on it and the words "trees used to grow here until this asshole bought a Keurig."

If you buy in bulk on Amazon you can get the cups down to around three for a dollar. You can also buy one of those reusable ones that you can fill with regular coffee grounds if you only want to make a single mug. I have one of those -- I've never used it and only bought it to appease the Recycle Nazis.

Every time I log into Amazon, this pops up.



By the way, we settled on the best of both worlds and bought a dual coffee maker that brews pots on one side and K-cups on the other. No matter how much caffeine I need, I'M READY.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

It's one of those things that people virtue signal about. I will admit I don't miss that about not having offices. God, can you imagine selling us work at home types on that now? "Come into a place where you are elbow to elbow with people and oh, a percentage of them will not be able to resist commenting on what you have for lunch because they are pieces of garbage."

We stopped with the Keurig cups because we got several batches of cups that had some issue with the seal. The explosion and mess from Keurig is worse than the equivalent for a coffee pot, which for me is occasionally forgetting to put the pot in the slot. I did not care for the K-Cup Explosions!! (Band name?)

[AArdvark]

I thought vaguely about the fill-it-yourself cups but it hasn't gone past the maybe stage yet. I don't care all that much about the environment of the future; Just being real here. Come to think about it, the coffee vending machine at work dispenses paper cups. before I started bringing my own I must have thrown away hundreds of paper cups. The bistro salads that I take for lunch have a plastic fork in them. I never use that plastic fork, I bring a real fork from home. That plastic fork goes unused into the garbage almost every day. There must be thousands of plastic forks in the landfills. Perhaps one day the seagulls will evolve opposable thumbs and use the forks we left for them to eat our garbage, then they will thank us! The amount of plastic that gets tossed casually away every day must be in the metric tons. Funny, remember when choosing plastic bags, back in the late Seventies, was a good thing because it didn't use up all the trees? I recall commercials from my youth to that effect. We've come so far! Now it seems like there's too much disposable plastic. I've never had anyone say anything about ecology related subjects at work, mostly because nobody there really cares, we're not educated enough to give a crap.

THE
MORLOCK
AARDVAK

[Flack]

Trivia fact: the Atari logo was modelled after a mountain of K-cups.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I agree with Vark mostly. I do care about the environment, but for god's sake, go bother corporations about it. The classic example of this is a city in Arizona or wherever screeching at their citizens to use less water for bathing while letting the local golf course use as much as they want. If someone wants to ban k-cups go for it, but I am not going to all DURR DIDJA KNOW???? to my co-workers if that's how they choose to roll.

Nobody in a work environment should ever speak to anyone else about any subject, work included, is what I am going for here.

[Flack]

Just do what I do. I told my coworkers, "if one more person says something to me about these K-cups, I'm not coming back into the office for two years!"

21 months and counting!

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Also, the Ouya logo was originally designed out of two old K-Cups the creators found in a landfill.

[Flack]

I just think people should prioritize stuff. A couple of years ago everyone decided straws were bad for the environment. The three choices we were given were to carry around a metal straw around with us at all times, use no straw at all, or start using these stupid paper straws that only last half as long as my drink. I had a coworker give me a look of pain when he saw me using a plastic straw, that same look you reserve for when your grandpa uses the "N" word in a restaurant and then says "but it's okay because that's what we used to call them back then." The same guy who felt physical pain over my use of a straw drives a Hummer. Not one of those pussified, watered down ones but one that came with a 50 caliber machine gun mounted to the hood. Not only does it have a big ass engine, but each of the tires also have their own engines that sneak out at midnight and steal gas from pumps and then spray it into rivers, swerving to intentionally crush unhatched turtle eggs along the bank. There's a button you can press on the dash that converts the rear bumper into an oil drill that, when finds oil, sprays it into the air like confetti while the vehicle's horn plays Dixie. I keep seeing all these pictures of the arctic ice shelf collapsing and there's not a single goddamn straw in any of those pictures. You know what I DO see?



Ok my bad there's a straw. In my defense the one I had was green. I don't mean green as in environmentally friendly or anything. It was green plastic.

[Jizaboz]

There are some things I like about keurigs and some I don't. Back when I worked for the coffee company, we had a lot of k-cups around to sample. Some machine models broke a lot and we'd have to replace them. We also had the problem of customers calling us back and saying they opened a box and 90% of the cups were already opened (seal had failed). I don't have one at my house, but I would use one if I got a free one or whatever.

[Flack]

Hey 'Vark -- dunno if you're interested, but I was shopping at Ollie's one time and ran across these on sale:



My kid loves 'em and they are nice on cold mornings. They pair nice with the 1lb bag of cereal marshmallows from Amazon.

[AArdvark]

Not sure if a hot mug of twinkie is for me. I would try them though, if I saw a box at the grocery store. Never had a hot chocolate one before

[Flack]

The other two are cappuccino flavors, which are also pretty good. I want to say those 30 packs were on sale at Ollie's for $10, which... 33 cents for a mug of hot chocolate isn't bad I guess.

[Jizaboz]

When I did the K-CUPS I went HARD!!

I'm talking muthafuckin Green Mountain Double Black Diamond HARD! HAAAAARRRRDDDD

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