Hamburg’s Department of the Environment and Energy has banned single-use coffee pods in every state-run building in the city in an effort to reduce waste and set and example for the world.
“These portion packs cause unnecessary resource consumption and waste generation, and often contain polluting aluminium. The capsules can’t be recycled easily because they are often made of a mixture of plastic and aluminium. It’s 6 grams of coffee in 3 grams of packaging. We in Hamburg thought that these shouldn’t be bought with taxpayers’ money.”
-Jan Dube from the Hamburg Department of the Environment and Energy
The pods are convenient, but come with a high price tag for the environment. They are difficult or impossible to recycle, as they are made from a combination of plastic and aluminum that can’t be separated.
Keurig is responsible for selling more than 9.8 billion of these coffee containers in 2014, and their sales are only increasing.
If you line up all of the single-use coffee pods sold by Keurig in one year, your chain of trash would circle the globe 12 times.