Coffee pods better for planet than other brewing methods: study

Here’s a decide on-me-up for fans of espresso pods.

Espresso pods are essentially greater for the setting than traditional filtered espresso, in accordance to a study released previously this thirty day period.

The pods, applied in Keurigs and very similar machines, experienced been decried as awful for the environment because many of them can not be reused or recycled.

But a group of Canadian researchers at the College of Quebec determined to look at the full espresso-producing approach, from farm to landfill, to establish environmental impacts.

Their results, posted Jan. 5 in Australia-primarily based academic media outlet The Conversation, confirmed that filtered coffee is actually the most environmentally unfriendly way to brew espresso. Only instant coffee can be much better for the earth than pods, according to the researchers.

“The pollution resulting from the preparing of espresso at household is just the idea of the iceberg,” the authors wrote.

The wide vast majority of a cup of coffee’s environmental footprint comes in the generation procedure, in accordance to the research.

Researchers found that coffee pods are much more environmentally welcoming mainly because they brew an ideal amount of money of coffee. Other procedures generally lead to extra espresso, which entails more output and much more greenhouse gas emissions.

“At the shopper level, beyond cutting down coffee use, steering clear of squandering coffee and h2o is the most effective way to reduce the carbon footprint of regular, brewed and soluble coffees,” the authors proposed.