I was a coffee snob, now I'm making a difference.

When I moved to the country there were two things I couldn’t or wouldn’t compromise on – pizza and coffee.  (I have my own wood fired Pizza oven now)

With the raging arguments on climate change, I’ve become tired of people yelling and hoping someone will make a top down change in legislation. I believe that change will only come from a bottom up ground swell of action and when leaders see the majority of households are willing, and are making changes, they will act.  

So I’ve set myself a task, every month in 2020, to review all aspects of what I do on the farm and make changes to lower my carbon footprint. Big or small I’ll make some changes and in January that change is COFFEE PODS.  

K-Cup creator John Sylvan regrets inventing Keurig coffee pod system nearly 20 years ago and says he regrets doing so as an environmental catastrophe.

I looked at recycling the pods and that seems labor intensive on my part, pulling them apart separating aluminium from plastic then cleaning them out and posting back the plastic pods would also be an ongoing extra cost. 

My thinking is that a coffee pod system is just a convenience and it’s certainly consistent.  Every morning the exact same coffee and once you have found your particular flavour it’s so consistent there becomes and addictive comfort in using it. But the reality is it’s just hot water through coffee and I can do the same thing using a traditional coffee boiler and again finding the brand of coffee I like through this process. 

So drinking 3 cups of coffee a day from a coffee pod I generally pay 50 cents for so my cost is around $1.50 a day or somewhere near $546.00 per year and then the ‘land fill’ of the left over rubbish. A coffee pod contains 5 grams of coffee. The first bag of coffee I purchased had 200 grams of coffee for the $7.00 I spent so in comparison to a pod at 50 cents each coffee will be now be 17 cents.  The pod machine was $120 when I purchased it a few years back and the coffee boiler cost $98.00 in comparison. 

So it looks like my first carbon reduction project will actually have a yearly saving of around $355 per year.  Not bad, helping myself and helping the environment and if my next project costs me a little more I’ve already some saving in the bank to pay for it. 

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