Came across an interesting letter to the editor in The Daytona Beach News-Journal today. Its from Penelope and she writes in to them in response to an earlier article they ran about Single-Serve coffee machines and the environment.

Penelope does make a lot of sense with her comments, and echos the feelings of probably lots of coffee drinkers about single-serving coffee. It does seem wasteful. Then you have the argument about wasted pots of coffee and the energy needed to keep the coffee warm, but we aren’t going to address that angle right now.

She talks about the Senseo Pods, and how these pods are made to be biodegradable. I was in Wal-Mart tonight, scouting the different kinds of single-serve coffee they stock and did notice that some Sara Lee Senseo Coffee Pods were being sold. The package touted that the pods could be used in any single serving coffee machine. I didn’t think about it too much at that moment, but now I am. I’m curious about this!

I do see some products out there, namely this Perfect Pod Holster “as seen on tv” (lol). It is an adapter for Keurig Machines that lets you insert a pod into the reusable plastic shell and put it into your Keurig and brew a single cup of coffee and then toss just the pod. Novel concept. At the moment I’m using the Ekobrew reusable to see how well that works and honestly I’ve brewed more cups in it than I have prepackaged K-Cups.

The big thing about the K-Cups is that they are packaged well, plastic and aluminum and paper filters. It makes sure that you get a fresh cup of coffee. But the downside to that is that it isn’t extremely environmentally friendly. Green Mountain Coffee, to their credit, is working on both ways to recycle their K-Cups as well as how to make them out of other materials. More, we are sure, to come on that in the future.

Excellent letter Penelope! It is a thought that many of us have so you are not alone. It’s just that at that time of the morning, the primary concern seems to be getting coffee inside you and not so much about what to do with the leftovers. Anyone else have thoughts on reusable K-Cups or recycling them?