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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

> The reason why coffee pods are awful and need to die is the sheer, disgusting amount of pointless waste they create.

It’s funny how people are so high and mighty about the small stuff and then let the absolutely enormous stuff pass completely. Are you this judgmental about living in a stand alone house vs an apartment in an apartment building? Taking plane trips for vacation?

Or do those bog standard—celebrated even—parts of upper middle class life get a free pass while you sneer down your nose at people that don’t pull their own espresso shots to save a few hundred ounces of plastic a year “for the environment”?

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Because one is easy to eliminate, and other things are not (or occurs rarely).

Making 2 coffees twice a day is something that adds up. Same as with bottled water, you can just buy filter flask/bottle/ etc. and use tap water. Or recycling vs not bothering.

This whole argument of: 'Well you drive, or fly, or use coal power etc, so dont bother with little things' it is just cuddling of mind. Conditioning not to care as you can do nothing to change the outcome of anything. So CONSUME!

Yes those are small things but its the mindset that will make you more conscious and less egocentric in a long run.

Getting an apartment instead of a house IS easy in most places, it's just a bigger sacrifice which I think is the point. Privileged people unwilling to make sacrifices sneer at others who might actually might be doing a better job overall.

> Privileged people unwilling to make sacrifices sneer at others who might actually might be doing a better job overall.

Yes, I agree though its a bit of a straw-man.

The world would be a better place if we look inwards for things to improve, instead of outwards for confirmations how everyone else sucks.

Also:

>Getting an apartment instead of a house IS easy in most places If you have 2 kids and you work from home, then a 2 bedroom apt will hardly be 'easy', both logistically and mentally.

> then a 2 bedroom apt will hardly be 'easy'

The point of the apartment isn't to downsize in terms of number of bedrooms, it's more that heating and cooling something freestanding takes a lot more energy.

I don't think you got the point. The point is not to build a straw-man as an argument as I can do it too and it gets us nowhere.

>it's more that heating and cooling something freestanding takes a lot more

What about temperate climate without huge swings in temperature, plus its new house with A+ insulation and solar. So you are more green as you save on electricity.

I don't mean to say anything about your specific situation. OP was pointing out that people tend to hyperfocus on insignificant optimizations, and mentioned living situation as a big optimization that almost nobody thinks about.

Furthermore, the typical Nespresso drinker is very likely someone who has the money to fly. So it’s about ways how someone with a lot of money could still try to make an effort to reduce waste and environmental impact.

Because with literally every other coffee making method, the waste products are 100% biodegradable/compostable (coffee grounds and filters). They also cost significantly less - you can make a fantastic cup of coffee in <5 minutes for 50¢ with $50 in equipment that will last for at least a decade. Nespresso is rent-seeking and trying to upsell convenience and laziness at the expense of the earth. That behavior needs to be put down.

Most coffee beans come in non-degrading packages. It’s less waste than Nespresso, but it’s not 100% either.

I don’t think rent-seeking applies to Nespresso. Yes they make money from laziness, but it’s not rent-seeking in a parasitic way. You can stop buying Nespresso any day.

I agree with your overall point though. I have a Gaggia Classic. Running with relatively low maintenance for 6 years now. But when I’m on vacation, I actually appreciate a Nespresso machine in an Airbnb.

Those shitty little cups cost more than regular cheap-o coffee, generate more waste, many involve running incredibly hot water through cheap plastic (I’m sure that’s great for our health), and have a weaker flavor. There’s zero benefit to it.

Frankly, the cups deserve more hate. Companies sold people a clearly inferior product and people keep buying them despite them being objectively worse than any other common coffee brewing method.

Sure, there are plenty of bad things out there, like abandoned fishing nets trashing up the ocean and coal polluting our air. But you can’t get your mom to do anything about that. You can get her to buy a $5 coffee can and make something better than a disposable coffee pod.

They’re aluminium.

Or course it’s on your mom—because those old people have no environmental awareness and need to be constantly educated by their ethically superior children.

Why aren’t you going after the people posting Machu Picchu and Angkor Wat selfies to insta? Not as much fun to be a scold when there are real social consequences?

If there’s one thing I hate about contemporary culture it the puritanical self righteousness.

People do complain about that. But people usually concerns themselves with the actions of people closest to them. Meeting someone and calling them an asshole about a vacation they took once 3 years ago is a different level than telling a good friend or family that they’re wasting gas or buying shitty, harmful coffee.

The one thing I hate more than anything is whataboutism that aims to stall any sort of progress. The “we can’t criticize anything because we still have another problem and only self-righteous people want to better things and appropriately handle things on a per-case basis” crowd is really just pure tedium to deal with.

Try worrying about the plank in your own eye some time. The results might surprise you.

I see both sides here. On the one hand, let's do what we can to reduce waste, even if it seems small. On the other hand, let's not overly focus on small things while ignoring the big ticket items: heating, A/C, transportation, diet, food waste, and a number of other things are more environmentally damaging than small pieces of plastic.

Plastic isn't ideal, especially when it gets out of our waste system and loose in the environment. However, plastic is cheap to make, convenient, clean, customizable; it's here to stay for many applications, so we'll have to do our part to use plastic wisely.

...or my favorite incongruity--being very concerned about little things, but being 30, 40, or 50 pounds overweight!

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-shift-obes...

People have been living in standalone houses longer than I've been alive. People have been flying for vacation longer than I've been alive. Maybe we should work on those things, but they are not new, and (right or wrong) could even be argued to have been a measure of living standards for quite a long time.

What hasn't been around longer than I've been alive is a new way to make coffee have far more environmental impact than it used to. We're supposed to be making things better, not worse. So, yeah, I can be high and mighty about your new way to needlessly generate trash while still living in a standalone house, and not a bit of cognitive dissonance in sight.

Those things aren't new, but the scale of it is new. In particular, passenger air travel has absolutely exploded the last couple of decades. According to this [1] chart, the number of passengers have doubled in 2006. It's up by a factor 13 since 1970.

Our systemic environmental problems don't mostly come from new concepts, but from population growth and globalization.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.AIR.PSGR

Humans are cognitively extremely bad at comprehending (visualising) the big effects that can accrue from small things (hence the magic of compound interest). We expect big effects to come from big things.

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