Office coffee machine refills are better for your health and the planet
Office coffee machines don’t save time and hassle
How do you make a cup of coffee for every person in the office every morning? After all, this is a work-place (and maybe social-media) activity that we all do from time to time and it might be assumed that these devices would lead to time and hassle saving and there’s some truth in this assumption.
In 2008, researchers at the University of Washington discovered that workers who used a ‘pump and dump’ technique to open a new Starbucks counter were twice as likely to make new friends while enjoying a healthy pick-me-up. The skill, known as “buzz trading,” involves the behavior of sharing an order with a friend in the hope that they will purchase some of what is being sold in order to protect your order from becoming stale and getting ‘pancaked.’
However, researchers also found that the same technique didn’t transfer onto other coffee shops and would be unlikely to pay off at home, regardless of the type of coffee or where it was made.
The time-saving is just as dubious. A 2000 study by the University of South Florida found that the number of seconds it takes to make a latte is 3.7 billion. The study estimated that in 2004 it would have taken 9,984,709 days of man-hours (2.6 million years) to make enough coffee to equal the 10 coffee beans required to produce a single coffee made in this study.
But when it comes to the environmental cost, the concept doesn’t appear to hold up.
Studies have found that drip-style coffee machines reduce water usage by 80 percent compared with other machine coffee machines and coffee makers (based on the amount of water needed to make and brew a single cup).
In the midst of water shortages and droughts in many areas across the planet, the removal of water for brewing coffee from the environment might seem like an unnecessary drain on the planet’s resources.
However, according to Greenpeace, even the highest water consumption by
