...must not be mutually exclusive with my committment to care for the earth. And this is a challenge. I am the mother of 3 children, ages ranging from almost 9 to almost 2. I work as a doula, so at times I am up all night long and for 24+ hour stretches. I need coffee to drink like I need air to breathe.
At one of my favorite hospitals, there is a Keurig Coffee Maker. I am tethered to that thing the way laboring women are tethered to medical equipment (and to read my thoughts about this, please visit my other blog!). I usually try to bring my stainless steel coffee mug with me when I work to avoid using a paper cup, but the single use coffee container/filter thing from Keurig or any other similar coffeemaker has resulted in 1.6 billion single-use coffee cup/filters used in 2009. The coffee is decent and brewed in seconds, but the plastic gadgets go into a landfill for decades, if not a centuries. How green is Green Mountain, who bought Keurig?
My other pleasure, when running about my life with my youngest, is to grab a quick coffee on our way to wherever we're going. A cup of coffee amid a sea of toddler mayhem is the only escape I need. But by forgetting to carry my reusable travel mug with me -- just this year alone -- means I contribute to a projected 23 billion paper coffee cups used. For a whole host of reasons, these paper coffee cups are not recycleable. Post-consumer materials in coffee cups usually only accounts for 10% of the material in each cup. The other 90% is newly acquired, because the cup would be too flimsy without new material.
If you prick my veins, my blood runneth black with dark roast. Since longer stretches of sleep are not in my near future, UrbanEcoMama needs to stash the travel mug in the diaper/doula bag. And the Keurig coffee maker at Mt. Auburn Hospital? I'll take suggestions, because even the sludge they sell in the hospital cafeteria is not available at 3AM.
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