Optimize Your Coffee Habit
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If your morning cup of coffee habit is a vital part of your day, you’re not alone. 90% of the world consumes caffeine on a daily basis!
Chances are, you have built some daily habits around your delicious mug of energy juice. We certainly have. Once we deliberately skipped our morning cup because we were going to a Coffee & Tea Festival. (This seemed like a good idea at the time.) By the time we got there—thanks, traffic jam—the headache had begun. Finally, we arrived at the door. The air smelled of delicious coffee. The hall was packed with vendors with coffee samples. Tiny, tiny samples. We scrambled to find an Aspirin.
Anyway, the fact that it’s a daily habit makes it a great opportunity to make a difference.
Ethical Consumerism
You’re probably going to buy a lot of coffee over time, so your purchasing decisions can add up to quite an impact, both on the lives of your coffee growers and on the environment it’s grown in.
So, research the coffee you buy. Find out where and how it’s grown, starting with looking for organic, Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance certified, and/or UTZ certified labels. Coffee growing is already being affected by climate change. And, “coffee farmers are among the worst treated in the world,” as Smithsonian Magazine explains. (Fair Trade may not be perfect, but it’s somewhere to start.)
Quality over quantity
When you’ve done your research and you’ve found some specialty coffee, you may find it’s more expensive than the stuff you’ve been buying. One way to make up for it is to drink less.
Wait, come back! There are other benefits to reducing your caffeine intake, too, including:
less jittery anxiety;
better sleep;
no caffeine withdraw headache when you’re running late; and
better hydration.
Just…take it from us. Reduce your intake a little at a time, and let your body adjust. Don’t be like us and give it up cold turkey, only to be miserable and give up after a couple days. (It worked better the next time, when we cut one cup at a time over several weeks.)
Reduce Coffee Habit waste at home
Your daily coffee habit is also a great place to reduce waste in your kitchen. Look closely at what you’re buying, using, and throwing away, and figure out somewhere you could reduce waste. Here are a few ideas.
Buy your coffee in your own container from a bulk supplier, such as a health food store. (This will help with the price, too.)
Use a coffee pot that requires no disposables. We have a drip machine with washable filter and a French press. Both are well loved.
Don’t buy a pod-style machine. Just look at all the packaging those pods generate! They’re expensive, too. If you already have one, or if you really must make only one cup of coffee at a time (good job reducing your caffeine intake!), use a refillable pod (it may have come with the machine; it may be in your bottom kitchen drawer) and bulk coffee.
How to reuse your coffee grounds? We typically compost ours. You can also use them in your garden to fertilize and repel unwanted insects.
Reduce Waste on the Go
Leaving your coffee-making to the professionals at your awesome local coffee shop? That’s great, because coffee shops are usually awesome, and often have ethically sourced coffee. But according to eCo2 Greetings, we throw away approximately 50 billion disposable coffee cups every year in the U.S. alone.
And the layer of polyethylene inside the paper cup makes it difficult to recycle, unfortunately. (Do recycle the lid, though!)
Fortunately, it’s easy to do your part. Make an intentional effort to remember your reusable coffee mug for the next few weeks. The more you do it, the easier it will be to remember.
Side benefit: You can choose a disposable mug that will best fit your life. Need it to fit in a car cup holder? Need it to stay warm for hours? Need an extra secure lid? There are options out there that are way, way better than the standard coffee shop paper cup. Plus, you can get one in your favorite color, one with a snarky quote, or one with your band name on it.
Is that not enough benefit? Many coffee shops offer a discount if you bring your own mug. (After all, they won’t have to buy one for you!) Say you get ten cents off every day for a year—that’s $36 in your pocket. Enough to buy someone else a disposable mug!
Think of it like this: If each of us reduces our disposable-cup coffee habit by half, by remembering our reusable cups every other day, we will save 25 billion cups from the landfill. That’s a coffee habit to nurture.
