The Total Opposite of Polluting Keurig Pods: Coffee Cups That Grow Flowers

[Omaha Steve]

Alex Henige’s Kickstarter project could change the afterlife of your caffeine fix.

March 04, 2015 By Sarah McColl

Sarah McColl has written for Yahoo Food, Bon Appetit, and other publications. She's based in Brooklyn.

Video: https://d2pq0u4uni88oo.cloudfront.net/projects/1596185/video-494758-h264_high.mp4

Coffee might be the most essential life-giving property of your entire day, but if recent news is any indication, making it is basically ruining the world. Take nonrecyclable K-Cups, the little pods popped into machines to instantly brew a single cup of coffee in the office break room, nine billion of which end up in landfills each year.

And the cappuccino-filled paper cup that makes the morning commute go down that much easier? One hundred forty-six billion of those get tossed every year.

That’s why Cal Poly landscape architecture student Alex Henige’s thesis project is such a promising one. The world’s first plantable coffee cup is made from a blend of postconsumer paper and cotton. It’s biodegradable and embedded with seeds. After serving as a vehicle for your caffeine fix, it lives a second life as the decomposing growing medium for a host of plants. Henige’s Kickstarter for the Reduce. Reuse. Grow. project reached its goal of $10,000 on Tuesday.

The pastoral recycling idea struck at a typically urban moment. “I was driving on the 101 down in Los Angeles, and there was a whole bunch of trash on the side of the road,” Henige recalled. “And I was thinking, ‘Wow, what if each piece of trash was a plant?’ ”

FULL story at link.