I'm no "LEED certified environmental consultant" or "person with a grasp of basic science," but it seems to me that brewing coffee one cup at a time via disposable plastic "K-cups" is a mite wasteful. Well, that's just "consumer perception."

Back in the olden days people bought big containers of coffee grounds and put them in a coffee maker with a little paper filter and voila, you had a whole pot of coffee. This was too much work (or something? Still unclear on this point), so now people can buy special machines that cost far more than a regular coffee maker, then buy boxes and boxes of single-serve plastic "K-cups" that are way more expensive than regular coffee, and put the K-cup in the machine and push a button and get precisely one cup of coffee, and then throw the K-cup away, off to some landfill, so that in order to make a pot's worth of coffee you generate about a dozen small plastic cups, that go in the trash. Also to make the whole thing super funny, these tiny plastic monuments to decadence and laziness are manufactured by environmental-friendly Green Mountain Coffee. The problem here, the company tells the NYT, is you, the consumer:

Michael Dupee, Green Mountain's vice president for corporate social responsibility, said some customers did not like to see the waste. "Consumers see the waste stream," Mr. Dupee said, "and they compare it to what they had done before, and they have a perception that there is a problem."

Silly consumers, always perceiving things. I am totally going into the kitchen at the office here to have a nice K-cup of coffee to calm me down. It's so easy!

[NYT. Pic via]