Umm…Urine?
I switched to a Nespresso Essenza Mini a while back and it tastes much better. You can send in your pods to be recycled by Nespresso.
That’s not better, that’s arguably much worse.
You’re basically saying that the, at most, ten minutes of labor you’d put into grinding espresso beans and making it yourself is worth more than the energy and environmental cost of someone else grinding beans, packaging them into individual servings, shipping those to a store or distribution center, whatever step you take to get them, shipping the empty ones back, and then recycling them. I understand that thanks to economies of scale make the pods affordable to you, and that you value your own time and appreciate the convenience, but the overall cost to the planet to make and distribute these things is astronomical compared to doing it yourself.
Plus, you’re supporting Nestle, a company whose apparent favorite activity is stealing water, bottling it, and selling it back to the people they stole it from at a huge markup. They’ve done it in Africa, Canada, and in the last year they got caught taking millions of gallons from the San Bernardino National Forest. They are a voracious, amoral company that seeks to privatize the very essentials of human life “so that we’re all aware it has its price.”
That’s not exaggeration, former CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe famously said this in 2005:
“Water is, of course, the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value. Personally, I believe it’s better to give a foodstuff a value so that we’re all aware it has its price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water, and there are many different possibilities there.”
We’ve talked about these things on BoingBoing extensively so I’m honestly kind of shocked you’d even admit to buying a Nestle product, let alone claiming that it’s somehow materially better than Keurig.
It’s “espresso”, mind you, not “coffee”.
Oh well that just changes everything, you’re absolved of all sins and your opinions are ideologically consistent! 
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Your argument is extremely poor and based on false logic, unfortunately. So, no. Given the choice of pods, I’ll happily choose the ones that can actually be recycled by me dropping them off by hand at a distribution center.
Oh, we have, BBS Ensign?
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I meant the tea.
Aside from how the shit tastes you really can’t make decent tea by pouring hot water through it. No matter how powdered the tea.
It’s quite messy and time consuming which defeats the purpose. If you have one of the DRMed models you need a defeat device to do so.
The third party biodegradable pods tend to be the best option. Have a large amount of grounds in them so they actually produce a decent cup.
But even with that these things just don’t make particularly good coffee. They brew too fast, the temp of the water is off. They’ll brew multiple cup size, but there’s no real way to increase the amount of coffee along with the cup size.
You sort of peak at decent. I don’t drink much coffee. And when I do I tend to like very strong coffee, which isn’t really possible to get out of one of these. Most of my family have them though. And they’ve all gone through the same process. Infatuation with the ease, realizing the coffee is expensive and shit. Switching to the fresh ground filters, getting sick of the mess. Finding a better pod.
And now they’re all (finally) just getting sick of the things. My sister has found that in order to fill her travel mug with coffee she actually likes she has to brew 3 or 4 pods worth at the smallest cup size. Even with the good pods (which are cheaper despite having more and better coffee) or the fresh ground. She realized she was spending more per cup than just buying coffee on the way to work. And she wasn’t getting much convenience out of it. So she’s ditching the machine. Grandma’s DRMed unit won’t brew 3rd party pods anymore, even with the defeat device or a drm pod lid taped in place. Which is a problem because she bought it because arthritis makes it difficult for her to brew coffee with regular machines.
It’s just not a good way to make coffee except in very limited contexts. Like the offices they were designed for.
They weren’t, from what I understand, designed for convenience. It was to simplify supply chain and logistics for providing coffee to large office. And minimize time employees spent making coffee and hanging out in break rooms.
They key convenience wasn’t in the brewing. It was in allowing large companies to receive scheduled deliveries of pods. Minimize maintenance and cleaning.
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Multi-blade razors suck. Because they have to have a frame at the ends of the blades to support them, you can’t cut a really clean edge the way you could with old safety razors. And they DON’T cut as well. The reason behind multi-blades is crappy steel. All the razor makers started buying their steel from China because it’s so much cheaper. And they found it is also much lower quality. The !#$ razors have to have 5 blades because that’s the only way to give you a decent chance that something will actually cut the hairs. Shaving with a single edge of Chinese steel would be no more of a shave than rubbing your face with sandpaper.
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Poor and based on false logic, you say? How about you give me something quantitative to back that up. Show me how buying a foil-paper bag of coffee beans from a retailer that I took public transportation to get to and from, grinding them myself, making them in my coffee maker, and producing only an empty bag as non-biodegradeable waste is worse for the environment than a process that involves all the same steps, plus a bunch of other extra ones. If it helps, you can even ignore the fact that I compost my coffee grounds for my garden.
My point is not that k-cups are “better.” The entire concept of coffee pods is terrible for the environment. The fact that you can put them on a truck and a plane and another truck to go to a recycling facility somewhere else sure as hell doesn’t offset much–if at all. The added logistics means that the most you’re likely to offset is some of the environmental cost involved in shipping the cups back for recycling. You’d likely be better off separating the foil and plastic, dumping the grounds in your compost, and tossing the remaining bits into your local recycling. We’re also assuming that Nestle actually recycles them, which given their track record, may not actually be happening. Recycling plastic isn’t like recycling glass or aluminum, it costs more money and energy to produce a useful recycled plastic product, and it’s hard to make profitable. There’s a reason why we have metal salvage companies and glass bottle returns, but nobody is paying money for waste plastics.
You mentioned “dropping them off by hand at a distribution center” and I’d really like you to expound on that. What distribution center? Are there a bunch of Nesspresso distribution centers all over major cities that you can drop your pods off to? Do you really think they’re doing the recycling there, and not just shipping them off to some bulk recycling center somewhere else? Also, even if that’s the case, what about the virtually everyone else who would not have that ability, and would instead mail them, or more likely, just throw them away?
It will never so much as break even, plus you’re also giving money to one of the most unambiguously amoral companies in the world. Pods are the problem, not the company that makes them, and Nestle does enough frankly evil stuff that giving them any money at all should make your skin crawl.
I’ve been compulsively visiting BB multiple times a day since 2003. I was first tipped off to Nestle’s practices from a post made here back in the mid/early 00’s. I’m an “ensign” because made a new account when we switched from Disqus to the current system, and up until recently I’ve not had much time to participate in discussion.
But please, I entreat you to justify the genetic fallacy argument you just made there. I’m really very interested to see how you can go from a purely qualitative “your argument is poor and based on false logic” to overt use of a well-known logical fallacy to discredit me.
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Your argument, as you stated, was that using recyclable Nespresso pods is worse for both the environment and for society at large than using K-cups. I disagree, since Nespresso pods are by definition recyclable.
Yes, actually. They send you a free bag with your pods and most cities have drop-off spots. Mine’s in a nearby hardware store. I’m aware they’re shipped to central recycling facilities; that’s still far better than large plastic K-cups going straight to landfills with zero options otherwise.
Well, you’re wrong, and proved in your post that your facts are incorrect. So, um. There you are then?
I agree that Nestle is not a nice company, by any measure. I also know that huge companies like Nestle are compartmentalized into many smaller companies, not all of which are evil by definition. The point isn’t that Nespresso pods are fantastic, it’s that there’s better options for convenient coffee than K-cups.
But I would also suggest that shaming people for buying things for their lack of knowledge of your BBS is not nice behavior.
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I don’t drink coffee, but I find this kind of stuff fascinating.
Where I work we have those clear glass coffee pots (I think it’s “Bunn” or something?). At least once a week our operations manager is sending out a mass email reminding people to stop putting the pot back on the burner when it’s empty, or to stop overfilling it, or not make an entire pot if it’s past noon.
But I know they won’t be switching to this system in spite of all that, because I can’t see them spending that much to fix those problems.
We have a similar system at my workplace. There is a standard Work Instruction form over the coffee maker with instructions for making coffee and maintaining the machine. When something is wrong with the machine, there is a hang tag to show that it is not functioning and needs repair.
Yes, we’re nerds. 
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You can get good quality steel out of China. So far as I know (from knives) the big problem with blades of all sorts manufactured in China is in the quality and consistency of heat treatment, and grinding. Which aren’t great. The most expensive, nerdy ass steels if worked in China end up with the same QC issues.
More over the German made from non Chinese steel cartridges (which most of the mail order services use) still don’t shave much better than Gillette and Schick. It’s an engineering problem. The blades in a cartridge razor are much narrower and only supported at the edges, where the frame is. So they have to be much, much, thicker than a DE blade. And the bevel is a lot blunter. The blades in a cartridge are no sharper than a utility knife blade, where as a DE is significantly sharper. Then they get mounted in the cartridge at a bad angle for the job they’re doing, where as a safety razor let’s you control the angle to maximize cutting, but minimize irritation.
A 2 blade cartridge renders a closer, more comfortable shave than the 26 1/2 blade ones. The added blades are a marketing gimmicks. More is better. But they further fuck up the cutting angle, and make it difficult to follow the contours of your face or get into tight spots.
I pretty much gave up on shaving more than a decade ago. Sensitive skin and look better with a beard. Don’t think I even own a razor anymore. But the only method I found that didn’t fuck up my face was straight razor shave at the Barber. Saftey razor might of work but never tried it.
This is what we have on the coffee maker:
and above it on the cupboard:
Apparently “we” are slobs.
Again, I have nothing to do with any of this nonsense.
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And if you want an espresso and not something made by a Swiss brand and advertise by an American actor, just go like most Italians :
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If I drank coffee with any regularity I’d probably go this route. It’s simple, brews small amounts, it’s strong, and brews good coffee.
IIRC these are also used to produce most Vietnamese coffee. More very good percolator coffee than really espresso. But percolator coffee is awesome.
As it is if I want coffee (which I may today) I just buy a cup. Or deal with the family fleet of kuerigs. Or visit my friend who’s way into pour over and vacuum brewers.
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preaching to the choir with me, lol – i use an old-style safety razor made by Maggard. same design since 1911! haha.
I might have to ‘borrow’ those signs; my team is moving into it’s own digs in a bit, and depending on what kind of coffee machine we wind up with, we might need those.
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yes, everyone, please support Bialetti! they’ve been around for ages, and now because of the rise of Keurig machines they are in danger of going bankrupt, from what i’ve read. the pot’s design pictured is so iconic it’s in the MOMA collection. AND it makes great coffee!
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Here’s the sign we have near our coffee pot -
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We have something like that in the bathrooms. We have a lot of signs.
Singing, “Do this! Don’t do that! Can you read the signs?”
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Sigh.
Okay, hear me out: recycling takes a lot of energy. Shipping things takes a lot of energy. Sending the pods back to Nestle, or even a regional recycling facility subcontracted by Nestle’s recycling partner Ag Choice, will expend more energy than recycling the pods through your local recycling pickup service. Shipping them back is meant to make you feel better.
Again, I want to make this very clear:
All coffee pods are wasteful. It is a matter of thermodynamics. They require considerably more energy to make, pack and ship, and produce more waste than traditional preparation methods. There is no way around this. They exist almost exclusively to make you pay more money for something you can in a cheaper and more environmentally friendly way by seeming more convenient.
Furthermore…
Those bags are collected and shipped via a partnership with UPS. You either drop them off at a “Nespresso boutique” which most places won’t have since there are only 500 of them in the country, select locations of retailers such as Williams Sonoma, or, and frankly, this is literally all you’re doing regardless of where you drop them off: giving them to UPS. There’s no distribution center, it’s a drop off point and they’re all collected by UPS.
I’ve looked it up, and here’s the process Nestle uses:
-separate the plasticised foil top from the pod
-remove the grounds to be sent to a composting company
-clean and recycle the aluminum pods which are shredded and processed so they can be sold to other companies.
Versus what I’ve suggested:
-separate the plasticized lid
-compost the grounds yourself
-throw the recyclable parts in your local collection
The two processes accomplish the same thing save for one thing: one way your local recycling center gets to sell the aluminum to help fund the cost of public recycling pickup and relies on considerably less expensive and less wasteful publicly funded infrastructure to do it. the other way expends considerably more energy (lots of UPS trucks and planes traveling much further) and gives the money to Nestle, a multinational corporation that thinks that the idea of access to clean water as a human right is “extreme.”
So yes, they’re still bad for the environment, and you still haven’t provided anything quantitative. My argument is and has been that pods are horrendously wasteful, and that the Nespresso recycling program doesn’t do much, if anything, to abate that. The fact that Nestle partners with Ag Choice and the scrap is sold rather than turned back into cups means that this is all about Nestle recouping some of the cost of the cups, and has very little to do with protecting the environment–also, Nestle has a long and documented history of not giving two shits about the environment, so this is not at all abnormal for them.
A thing you’ve still yet to prove in any quantitative fashion. I get that you like your Nespresso machine. I’m not saying you’re a bad person for that, but I am saying that you should be realistic about the impact that convenience has on the environment. Dropping those pods off in your little plastic baggie the next time you go to Williams and Sonoma to buy overpriced kitchenware is primarily to make you feel better. There are some pretty strong classist undertones to it, too, but I highly doubt you’d care, and that’s probably beyond the scope of this discussion. Also beyond the scope of this discussion is Nestle’s practice of convincing women in poor countries that breastfeeding is unsafe in order to overtly and intentionally trick them into buying insanely expensive baby formula that they’ll struggle to afford instead. Compartmentalized or not, don’t fucking give Nestle any more money.
The person that I am “shaming” is Rob motherfucking Beschezza. He works here. He’s a professional journalist who writes here, and has worked for other news publications in the past. He says a lot of things on this site that I take issue with for similar reasons, and this is certainly not the first time I’ve called him out for it. When I say he should know, I say that because he works here and has for some time, so he ought to know.
As for you, the only reason we’re talking is because you are personally offended that I made you feel bad for using a Nespresso machine. You’re some random person on the internet, not a journalist that has reach. If what I’ve said about Nespresso makes you feel bad or guilty or something, that probably means you know on some level that I’m right.
