Green Daily

Seeing as hundreds of Starbucks stores are closing and most people don't have the money to spend on fancy coffees anyway, how can you improve your at-home or at-work coffee drinking experience?

For those who like hot coffee and work in small offices, brewing a whole pot every time you want some coffee isn't always the best answer. You wind up with scorched and/ or extra coffee, and that smell that means the coffee pot is always on in the office.

One answer became popular a few years ago: single-serving pod coffeemakers that prepare a single cup of coffee from a pre-measured mini-filter pack or plastic cup filled with coffee grounds. But many, have questioned the green-ness of such a coffeemaker.

I could never buy one of the single-cup coffeemakers, because the thought of all those pods would create too much consumer guilt for me to enjoy my caffeine fix. But thanks to the advice of a friend who was gifted the wrong kind of coffee pod machine, I now know one way to lessen the environmental waste produced by them.

There are now. . . reusable filters for single cup coffee makers.
Some of the single-cup Keurig coffee makers have a filter that you can simply place where the disposable cup would normally go. You fill the reusable filter with the appropriate amount of ground coffee (again, in larger grounds than a normal pot) and still get your hot, single cup of coffee-- but only have to dispose of the used grounds.

Yes, you may still use more grounds of coffee per cup, but you don't have to worry about the piles and piles of little plastic cups--one for each cup of coffee-- filling your trash can, and then a landfill somewhere.