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Post by whollygoats on Apr 14, 2019 16:15:44 GMT
So, of late, I have been reintroduced in to the aisles of the local grocery outlets. My last trip to Freddy's (Fred Meyer supermarkets) took me to the coffee aisle, seeking a small set of instant coffees to accompany my new kettle in my upstairs guest space. (Or, for when I desire a hot beverage when I'm upstairs and needn't travel to the kitchen.) When I got there, I became confused because the entire side of about 70 or 80 feet of the market aisle, at about six foot tall, was various offerings of coffees. Most of them were packets of K-cups, anywhere from 10 to 30 K-cups per box. It was a veritable tsunami wave of boxes of K-cup coffee offerings. Obviously, something had changed in the whole coffee scene since I had last been shopping...
So, can anybody here explain to me what the attraction of this K-cup mania is all about? K-cups, I'm guessing, are the means of delivering the coffee to a particular machine, a Keurig, to make one's coffee. This Keurig has evidently replaced using the expresso maker, but I'm not exactly sure why. It seems that the K-cup is a disposable plastic cup about the size of a dentist's rinse cup, filled with coffee stuff. It fits a specific machine which brews the coffee, then the drinker extracts the K-cup and trashes it. One K-cup is generated for each and every coffee beverage brewed in the Keurig....maximum waste for a dubious 'convenience'. Given what I saw at the market, I can readily envision mountains of empty dirty little plastic cups choking waterways and spinning as a mountain of disposed plastic trash in the North Pacific Garbage Gyre.
So, what gives? Why is something so stupid so popular?
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Post by JoeP on Apr 15, 2019 8:48:27 GMT
The plastic waste problem is a big one, possibly a stupendous one, but apart from that they're not stupid. They offer a wide range of styles and flavours and thus are great for people who don't drink a lot of one particular coffee. Families where the partners like different styles of coffee and the kids like hot chocolate, say. The convenience is real.
If someone could come up with an economic* alternative to plastic for this market I think it would really take off. * Economic being current production and distribution economics, ignoring the recycling and other long term economics, which is a sad reality.
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Post by raspberrybullets on Apr 15, 2019 9:53:31 GMT
Is a k-cup one of those capsule coffee things? Never heard the term used here.
I was very disappointed to discover on the weekend that my fave chocolate shop for single hand made choccies, Koko Black, has started wrapping the little cardboard that they put the single chocolates on with plastic!! They have always used paper bags until now. Seems absurd when everyone is trying to reduce single use plastic waste.
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Post by Kye on Apr 15, 2019 10:48:54 GMT
I used re-usable K-cups when I had my Keurig. That way I could mix my caffeinated and decaf coffee together, and I wasn't throwing away a lot of plastic. I liked it because I didn't waste a half a pot of coffee when I made it and it was always the right strength --both problems I have at the moment using my coffee maker.
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Post by whollygoats on Apr 15, 2019 14:44:38 GMT
Reusable K-cups sounds decent, but what I was facing in the store was a tsunami of boxed plastic cups. Literally shiploads of little plastic cups. I was disgusted.
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Post by Kye on Apr 15, 2019 16:14:29 GMT
Yeah, I've seen those too. Pretty bad.
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Post by tangent on Apr 15, 2019 17:28:12 GMT
I'd never heard of K-Cups.
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Post by whollygoats on Apr 15, 2019 17:59:49 GMT
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Post by whollygoats on Apr 15, 2019 18:01:38 GMT
Wow...on my screen, that's actual size. Maybe and then some.
So, that's 24 tiny plastic cups pre-packed with coffee stuff (elixir or grounds, I'm not sure) which fits in to the special espresso type hot water machine and makes a single serving of whatever.
Of course, flavoring plays in to the whole marketing effort and the demand for yards of market display space. Vast varieties of flavoring.
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Post by whollygoats on Apr 15, 2019 18:07:55 GMT
I'd never heard of K-Cups. It hasn't got there yet, or you're just oblivious? I'm admitting I was oblivious and having heard of the rage in passing, did not know how it had impacted my local grocery outlet. It must be widespread enough within my nearby community to support a tsunami wall of boxed K-cups at just one of the local food markets. Frankly, I'm flabbergasted. At least temporarily.
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Post by tangent on Apr 15, 2019 18:27:42 GMT
K-Cups are available in one or two supermarkets in the UK. The generic form is known as the coffee pod and a few brands are available but my guess is that they are not very popular. In any case, there is a move to ban disposable cups.
Meanwhile, some coffee chains are thinking of banning disposable cups.
This suggests K-Cups will not be very welcome in the UK.
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Post by JoeP on Apr 15, 2019 18:40:42 GMT
I suspect the UK single use bans (in place and being considered) are about the ones you hold the finished coffee in. The ones that would be recyclable cardboard if only they could find a recyclable cardboard that was ... coffee-proof. These bans are viable because you can target coffee shops and offices with machines.
What WG's talking about is for home use and liberty and freedom, and I get the feeling the UK public is against regulations on this sort of thing. Imagine if the EU introduced restrictions on coffee pods.
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Post by whollygoats on Apr 15, 2019 19:01:36 GMT
Invasion of the pod people.
How I am interpreting it is that now, folks can invest in their very own home espresso machine, a Keurig. Then, rather than deal with the mess and imposition of all the work associated with grinding your coffee beans, packing it in to a reusable form to insert in the machine, and then have to clean up after, they opt for these pre-ground, pre-measured, pre-selected and often exotically flavored coffee in plastic pods that you just toss in to the trash after brewing one cup of beverage. Convenience at the expense of the environment.
Hey, I'm as complicit as any other clueless American, but this seems all too egregious in the face of the news of wildlife, particularly ocean wildlife, dying in droves of plastic ingestion.
The midden pile grows.
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Post by tangent on Apr 15, 2019 22:16:20 GMT
Indeed.
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Post by ceptimus on Apr 16, 2019 11:04:32 GMT
A recent study in the remote mountains of the Pyrenees (between France and Spain) has found that microplastic pollution is now worldwide. They found that over three hundred plastic particles rain down on each square metre every day. The area studied was twenty miles from the nearest town and a hundred miles from the nearest city. Article in The Guardian
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Post by whollygoats on Apr 16, 2019 15:18:38 GMT
Yes...I don't doubt it. I was listening to a strident exchange over the banning of plastic straws and it was mentioned that plastic straws were the least of our worries and that it was the microfibers associated with fleece garments which were ubiquitous. Your point matches with that comment.
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