Recently-released biodegradable brands excluded, K-Cups are immensely unkind to the environment because they create a staggering amount of waste. And not just any waste: plastic waste, which is not biodegradable. For every six grams of coffee, K-Cup use creates about three grams of waste (Spoon University). While the cups seem tiny individually, and tossing one into a trash can hardly seems that bad, consider how many you use per week, now multiply that by everyone in your office, and multiply that by every office on the planet using these things. To put it in perspective, in 2014 Mother Jones estimated that we had disposed of enough K-Cups to wrap around the world 10.5 times. And that was six years ago; we hate to imagine how far we could travel on a street of K-Cups now.

Further, most K-Cups contain aluminum, which isn't something you want leaching into the earth and waterways, as it can be highly toxic at high levels, especially to aquatic life (via Environmental Geochemistry and Health). And even when it is recycled, the process of recycling aluminum creates toxic byproducts that themselves have to buried in a landfill anyway. Sticking to a regular old bag of coffee eliminates this problem entirely.