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How to be a more environmentally friendly coffee drinker
- NoboruWataya 4y agoThe crux of it seems to be that pods use less coffee than the other methods. Part of that is blamed on people using more coffee than they need (because they don't measure properly). However, pods also inherently use much less coffee - I think they use something like 7g per pod whereas it's common to use 15-18g when brewing or making espresso. But this is arguably a large part of the reason why a lot of coffee lovers don't like them. They use less coffee, and therefore don't have as much flavour, and trying to extract more flavour from less coffee leads to a bitter, over-extracted cup. Ultimately this is just the same as saying that using less of something (basically anything) is more environmentally friendly than using more of that thing. Which is quite likely true but also not that revolutionary (though I will admit the fact that so much of the carbon footprint of coffee is in the growing of the beans was interesting to me). Drinking water instead of coffee is more environmentally friendly again. The study also claims to have taken into account the amount of waste that ends up in a landfill but that is not explored in the article so it's not clear how they do it. Do they just look at how that feeds into GHG emissions? Because I think preventing the generation of a huge amount of plastic waste is an end in itself, regardless of the impact on GHG emissions.