Two companies are making coffee time more sustainable

This coating is key to ensuring the cup is dishwasher safe, smash-resistant, and heat resistant, which keeps contents warmer (or colder) for longer and eliminates the need for hand-protecting sleeves. Apparently, the cups even hold a slight aroma of the coffee it once brewed.

Despite being extremely durable – lasting ‘for years’ according to its website – the Kreis Cup is totally biodegradable. At the end of its lifecycle, the mug will disintegrate into whichever surrounding soil you choose to place it in. How’s that for waste-free living?

Now, here’s where I would apologise to my tea loving comrades, but you should’ve known from the article title that this wasn’t about you. Those enjoying other beverages (water, tea, or juice) won’t be able to get in on this, as the Kreis Cup is exclusively designed for holding hot or iced coffee, thanks to that lingering aroma I mentioned before.

Coffee lovers rejoice.

Compost those coffee pods

Odds are, if you don’t have a coffee machine in your kitchen, there’s probably one at your office. Sales for these appliances are only on the rise, with the market expected to reach a value of USD 6.36 billion by 2026.

Thanks to this coffee craze, 29,000 single use coffee pods go to landfill every minute and, like most single-use plastics, each one will take around 500 years to break down. During this process, they’ll release toxic chemicals into the environment which isn’t particularly great for wildlife, plants, or us.

Enter Grind, a local coffee company based in Britain. Grind is swapping its aluminium coffee pods for a completely home-compostable design that fully biodegrades within 26 weeks. Its recent product launch makes the company the first in the world to use the process of micro bacterial fermentation to create compostable coffee pods.

Sure, infinitely recyclable aluminium pods have become the obvious choice over plastic for most. But creating them in the first place uses a lot of energy and is quite inefficient – thus harming the environment through another avenue.

Instead of customers returning pods to vendors to be recycled or lazily chucking them into the bin, those using Grind’s coffee pods can let them decompose in at-home compost boxes. Checkout Grind’s real-time livestream of how their eco-pods break down in comparison to other pods.

It’s a wonder this design hasn’t been picked up already, considering that used coffee grounds are known to be great for composting by adding nitrogen to the mix, helping materials break down into mulch, and eventually becoming a nutrient rich fertiliser.

As a caffeine fiend myself, this is all great news to me and (hopefully) it was for you too. Well, I’m off to convince my boss to kit out the kitchen office now…