Be a Drip!

This commentary was originally posted and aired on Portland Radio Project.

Okay folks, cue the music...or just go to this YouTube of the Manhattan Transfer singing my theme, song, "Java Jive..."

I love coffee. I don’t mean that in the generic way that most Portlanders say, “I love coffee.”  I mean that I refuse to get out of bed until someone brings me a cup of coffee. Fit the paper cone into a funnel, put in two scoops of Stumptown, pour hot water over it.  And you can even compost the grounds.  How Portland can you get?

Portlanders recycle, we bike, we compost, we garden, and we drink coffee.  A lot of coffee.  Pour over, lattes, grande decaf skinny mochas with double whip, single-cup…whoa.  Back up.  Single-cup?

The Harris poll reports that the market for single cup brewers doubled in the last year alone.  You know, those machines that use a little teensy plastic container with two tablespoons of coffee and flavoring to make just one special cup of coffee?  According to the Oregon Business Journal, even our very own Boyd Coffee is now making single-cup coffee pods.  They use less packaging than other single-cup brewers, so I guess that’s good, the Oregon reduce/reuse/recycle aesthetic meets crazy-individual-serving-waste.   But really, people!  Even John Sylvan, the founder of Keurig, says that coffee made the single-cup way creates ten times more garbage than the drip method!

We’re talking hundreds of millions of pounds of coffee-pod trash going into landfills every year.

So I say, don’t be a derp, be a drip!  

Ahh!