EDITOR’S NOTE: Water cooler conversations at Green Mountain Energy often center on sustainability and conservation. This blog series features some of our best ideas, or “life hacks,” to help you manage your daily activities more efficiently.
If you’re like me, you got caught up in the Keurig K-cup craze quickly. The K-cup, a small pod of pre-packaged ground coffee beans, is the perfect solution for someone like me, who is a pretty terrible cook and an even worse coffee brewer. Their single shot, pop-it-in, push-a-button coffee maker was too good to resist, giving me back a huge chunk of my morning routine and making absolutely no mess.
Unfortunately, what the K-cup avoids in mess, it makes up for in waste.
Most K-cups aren’t recyclable. Keurig and affiliated K-cup coffee makers have tried to develop more sustainable containers, but the revolution has yet to occur en masse. The closest I could find to a recyclable K-cup was Trader Joe’s version – the cups are actually recyclable, but they’re individually wrapped in unrecyclable foil.
Working at a renewable energy company where employees are, for the most part, expert recyclers, composters, and all-around waste reducers made it difficult for me to get away with my K-cup habit without facing an onslaught of disapproving looks every morning as I dumped my single-use cups in the trash can.
Enter: Ekobrew’s refillable, reusable Keurig K-cup!
This little sustainable beauty serves the exact same function as a single-use K-cup, but results in far less waste, extra compost for your garden, and only slightly more work.
Buy and grind your own beans (I’m a big fan of these), pop your reusable K-cup into your Keurig, and brew, brew, brew! Then you can compost the used coffee grounds, rinse out the cup, and repeat.
You can find the standard K-cup’s sustainable cousin online or in home goods stores like Target and Bed Bath & Beyond.
Read more Sustainable Life Hacks:
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