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"To recycle, once the K-Cup® pod is cool, peel the lid from the puncture hole in the center, empty the grounds and recycle. Click here for more information on recycling steps. Please check locally, #5 plastic is not yet recycled in all communities."
Again no offense, but in an office environment that means "throw it in the garbage". I've tried peeling the lid off a K-up, and I threw it in the garbage then went out & bought a reusable one of my own. Only 3 people in my office do that and the rest throw their used K-cups in the garbage.
I dug deeper on TerraCycle's website and for $214 you can get a postage-paid box that holds 2,000 used K-cups that they will recycle after you send it back. Not sure if management would embrace financing that.
You do it your way, I put mine in my recycle container and take it in to town. You might try to educate your co-workers.
No offense but that sounds like a rumor. I'd love to just toss plastic in a bin and make a wish.
Chinese processing facilities stopped accepting recycled plastic from America a few years ago because it was too contaminated. If I toss a K-cup into the recycling bin I'm throwing way more than just #5 plastic in there.
Well, yes, that's the problem... most people would love to just toss plastic in a bin and make a wish. They don't want to wash (or even rinse) it out first, or take their leftover food out of it, etc.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ellwood
You do it your way, I put mine in my recycle container and take it in to town. You might try to educate your co-workers.
Educate how? Everybody knows recycling exists. If they don't want to bother, they don't want to bother. Nagging them until they hate you isn't going to accomplish anything.
Not every office even has recycling. Mine doesn't. I tried taking our recycling home a couple times for my curbside pickup, but that's not really fair to drag stuff from the office to a different city that has to foot the bill to recycle it, and it didn't seem very socially-acceptable to be essentially hauling bags of trash home from the office...
"To recycle, once the K-Cup® pod is cool, peel the lid from the puncture hole in the center, empty the grounds and recycle. Click here for more information on recycling steps. Please check locally, #5 plastic is not yet recycled in all communities."
Again no offense, but in an office environment that means "throw it in the garbage". I've tried peeling the lid off a K-up, and I threw it in the garbage then went out & bought a reusable one of my own. Only 3 people in my office do that and the rest throw their used K-cups in the garbage.
I dug deeper on TerraCycle's website and for $214 you can get a postage-paid box that holds 2,000 used K-cups that they will recycle after you send it back. Not sure if management would embrace financing that.
Any recycling containers should be pretty clean for sure. If there's some kind of dedicated K-cup recyling facility they'd probably have automated facilities for treating those specific things, but in a general recycling stream, I think it'd me much more of a problem than a benefit. If someone is trying to melt containers down and get high quality plastic, aluminum, or steel, it can't have some other material still attached, and it can't have a significant amount of food waste on it - all of that will be contaminants that will degrade the quality of the recycled material, lowering its utility and value. I've read that many Americans are "lazy recyclers" and don't worry about properly separating materials and cleaning them as needed prior to tossing them in the recycling bin, and a lot of it is simply sent to the landfill en mass anyway for this reason.
I think the most eco-friendly option would be to compost coffee grounds and unbleached brown coffee filters, or you can use a stainless or gold reusable filter and just trash the grounds. K-cups are super convenient but unless they get special treatment, they seem to maximize non-degradable waste.
I recycle all I can, but it costs so much to transport and recycle materials that it's not really much of an environmental savings.
Coffee makers are a good opportunity to Reduce or Reuse instead of Recycle; reusable kpods, paper filter machines, or even old fashioned percolators (where everything but the grounds are reusable) are all better choices than trying to get people to recycle the pods.
Those things are like using hotel-size shampoo bottles at home.
Bingo. Nothing is green about a keurig. If you want single serving coffee buy a small coffee maker. They do make them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by steiconi
I was at somebody's house today, and they had cut all their paper napkins in half "to reduce waste." I mentioned that we use cloth napkins for that reason, and they got all vague. Sometimes it seems like people have no ability to reason things out.
I think they were being cheap as opposed to green. Lots of folks don't like cloth napkins because they're work. But cutting paper napkins, which are biodegradable anyway, seems just cheap. Especially since I can't think of a time where I didn't use most of the napkin made available to me.
I recycle all I can, but it costs so much to transport and recycle materials that it's not really much of an environmental savings.
Coffee makers are a good opportunity to Reduce or Reuse instead of Recycle; reusable kpods, paper filter machines, or even old fashioned percolators (where everything but the grounds are reusable) are all better choices than trying to get people to recycle the pods.
Those things are like using hotel-size shampoo bottles at home.
Totally agree. Make a nice strong pot of coffee. Simple is better, cheaper, greener.
Totally agree. Make a nice strong pot of coffee. Simple is better, cheaper, greener.
Another thing I don't like about he Keurig machine at work: The arrival of that machine negated the existence of our informal "Afternoon Coffee Club". Several pots of coffee would be brewed in the morning. But by 2-3 in the afternoon not many would partake and the potential existed for wasting almost an entire pot. So we afternoon caffeine fiends took to polling/announcing to others like us, when we were about to make an afternoon pot. That added to the camaraderie in the office, and we lost that.
Recycling update: The president of my company authorized us getting the K-cup recycling box. I will report back here after it arrives and we've used it for a while. Hopefully everyone will be on board!
Recycling update: The president of my company authorized us getting the K-cup recycling box. I will report back here after it arrives and we've used it for a while. Hopefully everyone will be on board!
Update update: The K-cup recycling box arrived today and has been set up in the lunch room. It doesn't have the fancy graphics the box at the Subaru has, but then this isn't a high traffic retail area. Anyway the functionality is the same!
I will report back once we hit the approximate 2,000 unit mark and ship the thing out.
Chinese processing facilities stopped accepting recycled plastic from America a few years ago because it was too contaminated.
and before that they dumped all of our recycling into the ocean.
your k cups arent getting recycled. they are all contaminated. if you care, then brew pitchers of coffee the old fashioned way. coffee is better that way anyway.
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