With the recent growth in interest in sustainable living I’m seeing a lot of posts of beautiful people with Instagram-worthy lifestyles sharing their clearly enviable life decisions, and I just wanted to push back a bit against the rather intimidating impression this gives that no one ever gets it wrong. I’ve certainly made some mistaken purchases, with the biodegradable coir bottle cleaning brush that arrived swaddled in bubblewrap and wrapped in several layers of parcel tape being a prime example, so I thought I’d start a series of posts (perhaps pessimistically I’m sure there will be more) of mistakes I’ve made while trying to reduce single use products so that others don’t make the same mistakes, starting with a coffee maker I tried.
On the stove at home and when on a campfire or campstove I use my Bialetti coffee maker, a treasured gift from my brother. (There’s clearly a genetic component to my coffee addiction: my brother once asked me if he could borrow some means of making coffee outdoors off me for a stag weekend camping. Two weeks later he asked whether he could also borrow my tent. This is absolutely the appropriate order of priorities). The knob did get melted off the top by a particularly exuberant pocket of wood gas but Paul of Bardster’s Crafts lathe-turned me a beautiful replacement.
Unfortunately I don’t have access to a stove at work, and starting a campfire on the office floor would probably be frowned upon. I have therefore been using a plastic Hario filter funnel which works very well but does require a cone of filter paper to be used and disposed of for every cup of coffee made. While I do try and compost this when I can it’s still ultimately a waste of resources to use something once and throw it away, and while I haven’t found any information on the glue that is used to hold the filter paper together I assume it is similar to the plastic-based sealant used in many teabags. To avoid this I decided to move to a stainless steel funnel that I could add the coffee grounds to directly.
Unfortunately it was a disaster. I actually measured the time it took to make a full cup of coffee with this thing and it came out as an impressive 18:34 minutes; not only a painfully long time to wait for a caffeine fix, but long enough for the coffee to be lukewarm before you even touch it and certainly an awkward length of time to take out of the working day. “I’m just nipping out of the office to make a coffee, back in almost 20 minutes!” By contrast my Hario funnel with disposable single-use filter paper liners took a mere 56 seconds to fill the same cup.
There is a happy ending to the story at least, when I posted about this in a sustainable living forum another member said these filters were very useful for making home made botanical inks so I posted it to her and it is now presumably enjoying a much more interesting retirement facilitating exciting botanical crafts.
Tangled Bank Foraging and Fibre Crafts 