Hi, friends!
How is your week going? I hope it’s been good!
Is there something you see that is just stupidly wasteful?
Lately several people on my office floor have gotten those ginormous water bottles. Which, cool. I have too much arthritis pain in my hands to want to schlepp a 10 lb water bottle around.
But the stupid part? The water dispensers and the coffee machines don’t have enough space for those ginormous things to fit. Several times this week I watched people use the disposable small cups to just get water to fill up their giant water bottles and then throw the cups away.
Amazon packing & Keirig one use coffee things piss me off!
I understand the Keurig cup things for scenarios like “let’s try out a new blend” but also the refillable cups exist so I would think those would be more popular?
That requires cleaning, too much work for Americans
The Washington Post ran a really bad article early this year claiming that pods were better for the environment than drip.
The problem was they didn’t normalize for the strength of the cup of coffee. Keurigs use less ground coffee and make weak coffee. Drip typically uses more ground coffee to make strong coffee.
But so what? If you use your coffee machine to make coffee as weak as a Keurig, it’s actually better for the environment. Or if you use less water in your Keurig to make a strong, small cup of coffee, it’s worse.
What the article sort of vaguely tried to say was that the packaging is only a fraction of the environmental impact — you also have to factor in the shipping, electricity, etc. Which is fair enough. But the fact remains that all of those plastic pods will never have less impact than a paper filter, especially if you compost it along with the grounds.
I use one of those gold metal filters in my coffee maker so don’t create any waste other than coffee grounds which we compost so I call bullshit on that article.
Not to mention you can just use a mesh basket with some coffee makers if you don’t even want to bother with paper filters.
Amazon packing is the bane of my existence. A lot of packing is. In my building we have a very vigorous and rigidly enforced recycling regime, so down to the basement I trundle, breaking down the boxes and trying to find homes for the bubble wrap and the packing paper, and that’s not to mention the shipping labels I have to peel off and shred because of my paranoia about data theft.
Cousin Matty, if you have a preschool around you, and your bubble-wrap is the “individual round bubbles” type (not the large interconnected bubbles type), they might be VERY interested in taking that bubble-wrap off your hands!
Popping the small bubbles is a sensory-stim for some kids with autism. The occupational therapists i know LOVE it, for hand-strengthening exercises in kids with “low muscle tone” (hypotonia), we use it to help kids work on fine-motor skills *and* hand-eye coordination, and we also use it for painting–for painting *on* the bubble-wrap, painting the bubble-wrap then using it like a print (especially for painting “underwater bubble scenes” and wintertime “snow” scenes), annnnd we use bunches of it tied with string or a rubber band, as a *paintbrush* when we have the kids experiment with/explore using different “tools” to paint with!
Free bubble-wrap is basically GOLD in your local pre-K program–and I’m sure in a city as densely-populated as yours, you’ll probably have *multiple* that you could call & which are within a block or two of Chateau d’CousinMatty!
😉💖
THAT’S an idea. I have sort of checked out of my building’s civic life, because of a number of reasons, but I suppose I could conspire with the super and the porter to set up a separate bin in the basement for bubble wrap and post a notice in the lobby about donating to a preschool and maybe revive some kind of the communitarian sentiment that we used to enjoy. We have a few young children in the building now. The “first wave” kids are all now in high school or college, so maybe I could meet some of these newcomer parents that way. I could host planning sessions on the roof, or in my apartment, like I used to do for various building-related worthy causes.
We have two entire buildings of mostly empty office space that the company refuses to get rid of. Everyone knows they’re going to hang onto it to justify bringing us back. A few months ago the “leadership” asked in an open meeting if anyone had ideas to save money. The very first suggestion was to dump the office space, so of course the person running the meeting spent the next five minutes talking around the issue instead of actually addressing it which told everyone what they needed to know.
The overlords are still allowing us to work from home 2 days a week. We’re all assuming that will go away at some point this year.
So many jobs can be done from home. We’re just propping up landlords aren’t we?
A wild guess — early in the pandemic they got a cheap deal on extending the lease, bet that it would all blow over soon and everyone would be back, and have been living with the consequences since.
Another wild guess is they own the property, want to unload it, but are worried it won’t sell at a good price if it sits there barely occupied — bidders will think they’re desperate and offer lowball bids.
But what do I know?
One of the companies I freelance for recently announced an “at-least-three-days-a-week” in-office policy. My handler told me this, and I asked her, “But what about A, B, C, and D? They all fled and don’t live anywhere near New York. What are they supposed to do?” She replied, “It’s like the Berlin Wall. If you got out of New York before a certain date, you’re free and clear and can continue working from home. If, like an idiot, you stayed in the metro area, back into the salt mine you go!”
I like refillable water bottles but it sort of defeats the point if they’re going to continue wasting the damn disposable cups. That would piss me off. 😡
It’s always an option to turn your head upside down and drink straight from the spigot.
We used to bring our previous dog to our at-the-time local dog run. Some civic-minded local attached a hose to a disused water pipe (I think there must have been a fountain in that park at some point) and actually tested the water by drinking it from the hose, and a couple of days later declared it fit to drink. He was a local dog owner and worked for the City in some kind of environmental or public health way, so we took his word for it. I drank from it, but it tasted a little rubbery/plastic-y. My dog loved it, though, and so did all the other dogs.
“a couple of days later” is the perfect detail in the story. I can imagine the assembled audience waiting, perhaps with a stiff upper lip and a tear held back in one eye, waiting for him to show up without a tremor or paralyzed jaw.
Exactly. He didn’t show up with lesions or lockjaw. What he did was, he brought the hose back and, having self-experimented on himself and his dog, declared the water safe to drink. No cholera outbreaks, which is how it used to be spread in New York, due to tainted public water sources, like wells.
Edit: That neighborhood was so weird, in retrospect. Like, why did we all go along with this? It became ever wealthier and whiter (and I didn’t help, and BH wouldn’t go near the dog run because he thought all my dog run buddies were “Best In Show” level insane, which they were.) I think I got out just in time.
Right! I’ve used refillable water bottles at the office for almost 8 years. The issue is the fucking supersized ones people use now that are like the $100 yeti one gallon bottles that the office water fountains and coffee machines aren’t designed for.
i dont get the giant bottles of water…i mean…i drink a looooot of water in a day….and a 1l bottle is about as big as i want….sure i refill it like 6 times a day…..but the whole point of a water cooler is having cold water
even i cant drink one of those big bottles before it turns into ambient temperature water….
its a wierd choice
I have a 32oz hydro flask that if I put ice water in it. I have cold water all day even when it is left outside in the sun. I love that thing!
yeah…only after posting did i notice the yeti part of the comment….thermos bottles…
dont have one of those
ive got a plastic 1 liter bottle what previously contained bubbly fart water that i refill at work
till it gets dirty enough for me to hand it back in at the shop for my money back and get a new one with fresh bubbles
I see people using these gallon water bottles that are plastic and have motivational workout phrases on them too.
Americans and coffee waste. Holy hell. I use a French press. All I have to do is scrape coffee grounds into the compost. It’s not hard. It’s not time-consuming. There’s no goddamn filter to throw away. WTF?
You have to be a little careful with the French press, though. We have one, and I can get good coffee out of it, but when The Cellmate attempts it he makes lukewarm watery sludge with lots of gritty coffee grounds. I think in his impatience he plunges too early. In frustration, he began buying these super high-end digital coffeemakers, which I have no idea how to program and use.
But that’s all right. If Winston Churchill, who led his country to victory during World War II and roused his nation to defeat Hitler, could drink wine or champagne at breakfast, then so can I.