March 18, 2022

Plastic-Free Coffee & Tea

Last Updated March 18, 2022

If you’re like most people, you start your morning off with a warm beverage. A hot cup of coffee or tea is the perfect pick-me-up to start your day. But coffee and tea can come with a lot of plastics, including hidden plastics. Here are some ways to avoid it.

Coffee Tools

Now, the most obvious plastic waste when it comes to coffee, is the K-cup or any individual coffee pod. If you have a K-cup machine and don’t want to get rid of it, try using a reusable K-Cup and add your own coffee grounds.

There are many plastic versions of a reusable K-cup, but seeing how plastic leaches into your food when it’s heated up, I would recommend a metal K-cup. By using a reusable K-cup, you’ll avoid throwing away a tiny plastic pod with each cup of coffee and you’ll save money!

For example, at Target I can get 12 ounces of ground coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts for $7.99. That’s 67 cents per ounce.

The same flavor K-cup comes in a package of 22 cups for $15.49. Each K-cup has 0.37 ounces for a total of 8.14 ounces. Or $1.90 per ounce. That’s almost three times as much per ounce!

So save the waste and the money! Use a reusable K-cup with ground coffee!

If you don’t have a K-cup machine and are looking for a way to make coffee at home, I use a Chemex coffee funnel to make pour-over coffee.

You can buy paper filters to use with the funnel, but we chose a reusable Metal Filter:

I like this method in comparison to a regular drip coffee machine because it’s simple. I don’t have to plug it in! Also, I used to have a French press but it was cumbersome to clean the filter at the bottom.

Plus, your typical coffee maker is made with a lot of plastic and again, when the hot water percolates through the plastic parts, there’s a good chance some plastic or related chemicals leaches into your coffee. I like my coffee black…no sugar, no milk, no plastic.

If you don’t want to bother storing a big funnel, you can also buy a filter that sits on top of your coffee mug. I use this when I travel since you can detach the bottom from the funnel and it’s easy to pack.

The only downside is that the mesh on the filter is not as fine as the reusable filter from Ovalware so I do still get some fine coffee grit in my coffee. But it’s something I deal with when traveling.

Coffee Beans

Before COVID, I could bring my bag to Peet’s coffee and have them measure out a pound of coffee beans and dump it into my bag. Or I could find vanilla flavored coffee in my bulk bins. I haven’t tried going back since COVID because I bought a huge bag from my favorite roaster in San Diego, Cafe Moto. The largest bag size they have is 5 pounds and it lasts me about 6 months. So, when looking for ways to reduce plastic waste when buying coffee beans, check out the bulk bins or buy the largest bag you can find but can still use in a reasonable amount of time.

Tea Tools

For the tea drinkers, did you know that a single bag of tea can release over a BILLION microplastic particles into your tea? I don’t know about you but I like my tea without plastic, thanks. Most tea bags use plastic fibers so your tea bag won’t disintegrate in the hot water while steeping. Even the ones that look and feel like paper usually have plastic fibers.

So, the best thing is to switch to loose-leaf tea. The quality of the tea is much better and there won’t be billions of microplastics in your tea!

To get loose leaf tea, you can visit a local tea house and ask them to put the tea in a paper bag. Or you can check your bulk bins. If all else fails, find the largest bag you can find and you’ll know you’ll use.

To steep the tea, you can use either a tea clamp: