Well yeah. But it’s like the whole “Don’t use plastic straws or you’re bad” argument. We’re spending time talking about coffee pods being a problem but not about the basic slavery that is used to get the coffee. I get that we can do both at once, but complaining about people using coffee pods while seemingly thinking there’s an ethical way to drink coffee is a problematic thought process. There’s no ethical way to drink coffee in this modern era. One way or another, you’re consuming something that is in process having a vastly negative effect on the earth.
There’s a spectrum here. Ethics doesn’t have to be a binary evaluation or it kind of goes down an absurdist rabbit hole, i.e. is existence ethical?
There are some good options in the states for fair trade coffee, like Cafe Mam in Oregon.
I can’t find anything definitive on the percentage of recycled aluminium lost as dross, but I do note that dross itself can be recycled and/or repurposed. And Al2O3 itself has industrial uses.
When we’re talking about relative impacts of Al vs. glass recycling, transportation plays a major role. Glass is just damned heavy. And, given its relative ease of manufacturing, doesn’t have anywhere near the same incentive to collect and reprocess. Scrap Al recyclers can get something like $1K for a metric tonne of Al. Glass? -$2.44/t.
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And this is where regulation needs to enter into it.
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It’d take one hell of a regulation to bridge a gap of $1K/t in value.
And that’s before we consider the purely physical constraint – glass shatters. Al – unless you’re living in some truly extreme conditions – doesn’t.
Works in Europe.
(Far from perfect, but in comparison? Not that bad, either.)
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To be clear, not subsidies of the commodity, but regulation?
For beer specifically, a lot of consumers demand glass over aluminum cans because they feel the coating inside the can interacts with the beer altering the taste.
I personally have never noticed that. But glass bottles do keep beer cold longer than metal cans since glass doesn’t conduct heat well and a glass bottle has more thermal mass Than a metal can.
By “commodity” I’m referring to the material to be recycled, not the contents of the container.
And let’s not go down the rabbit hole of discussing beer “recycling,” please 
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I’m just saying there are times when using glass is appropriate and metal is inappropriate, and it can depend on the product it’s holding as well.
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Found a couple of articles describing the German Pfandsystem :
Sounds like it’s had a mixed sucess
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That is also a worthy discussion but it is a separate topic entirely. Whether your coffee was harvested using equitable fair trade labor practices has no bearing one way or another on whether that coffee comes in disposable plastic pods.
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Maybe not save although perhaps alter development of new technology for a drink.
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Waste disposal is governed by a number of European regulations and directives, whereby the former automatically apply to each of the member states, while the latter must be separately transposed into national law by each member state.
The basis of this legal framework is the Waste Framework Directive (2008/98/EC).
And if you follow the trail of regulations from the EU Waste Framework Directive into the individual countries and states down to the municipal waste disposal laws you’ll be busy for days. Weeks, possibly.
A compact overview on how all that is implemented in Germany can be found here:
Of course they are cheating; “thermal utilization” still counts as recycling, i.e. you can still burn waste. However, by now most waste incineration plants double as district heating plants and/or power plants on the local level.
And of course it’s an ongoing struggle. Updating regulations to close loopholes and react to trends in consuming or new products, interest groups lobbying one way or another, privatisation, reversing privatisation, and so on and so on.
The long and the short is that there is a working infrastructure in place and round about 2/3 of our waste is recycled. Paper, glass and metal works best, in that order. Which is hardly surprising because there has always been some sort of recycling in those industries. Plastic is still a big problem. Shipping empty soda bottles around the world to have them shredded and turned into microfibre fabrics that will end up in the food chain eventually isn’t a viable solution.
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WE heard this on our planet and gave it a try. The ice-caps were melting so we covered them with the coffee pods, turned upside-down to reflect light. That worked great! The ice-caps refroze from underneath and expanded. The equivalent of polar bears got kind of jittery though, but omelets… cracking eggs, etc.
We were also having issues with build-up of CO2. But the CO2 trapped by the pods necessary to cover the polar areas was enough to absorb a lot of that. Other coffee pods were saturated with CO2 and injected under the planets crust! Brilliant.
Finally, we had to cover the entire planet in coffee plants to make all those coffee pods. That worked great! We now use bi-products of the coffee bush for all our building, IT, transportation, cosmetic, sanitary, and sexual needs!
Thanks Boing-Boing for cutting through the BS and finding the right solution to our planets woes. Good luck to you on your planet.
Zume of Caffinator.
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Thank you for that recommendation. That looks like an amazing premise. And I’m not being facetious, this totally is my favorite way of reading history… those little side effects that happen as a result of technical innovation … things that nobody thinks about.
Now to see if my library has it 
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