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Sounds crazy? Yes, we totally agree with you.
But the City of Hamburg, the second largest city in Germany, did it and they ban the use of coffee pods in government-run buildings, offices and institutions like schools and universities as part of a drive to reduce environmental waste.
Love them or hate them, single-use coffee capsules are a quick way to brew a reasonable cup of coffee, and Germans use roughly 3 billion pods a year. But Hamburg’s Department for the Environment and Energy argues that coffee pods cause “unnecessary resource consumption and waste generation,” and “often contain polluting aluminum.”
And it’s not just coffee pods: announced as part of a 150-page “Guide to Green Procurement”, the city introduced a ban on buying “certain polluting products or product components” with council money. The ban therefore includes bottled water and beer, chlorine-based cleaning products, air freshener, plastic plates and cutlery. The report states: “These portion packs cause unnecessary resource consumption and waste generation, and often contain polluting aluminum.”
Jan Dube, spokesman for the Hamburg Department of the Environment and Energy, told the BBC: “The capsules can’t be recycled easily because they are often made of a mixture of plastic and aluminum.” “It’s 6g of coffee in 3g of packaging. We in Hamburg thought that these shouldn’t be bought with taxpayers’ money.”
By the way, that was in February 2016, way before Greta started leading by example…
If an entire City managed to ban pods, I guess we now have no excuse to follow their example and be more considerate towards our planet.
