A couple of years ago I fell into a trap.

Our coffee machine went down in flames. Without coffee, I'm an irritable zombie. The rush was on to find coffee, fast! At the time my husband and I were both working pretty well-paying jobs, and were purchasing things that people "like us" seemed to purchase. I had a nice car, we lived in a nice apartment, so why wouldn't we buy what the media says is the nicest way to make coffee?

That's the story of how we bought a Keurig. For two years we used it as intended, buying K-cups of flavored coffee and feeling a sense of entitlement every time I created a piece of garbage for every single cup of coffee.

As we have become more mindful recently, we decided the Keurig was one thing that needed to be addresses. We lived the idea of single cups of coffee. My dad makes a single pot of 12 cups and usually drinks it for two days before dumping the rest down the drain. We did a little research and ended up buying a reusable insert for the machine with a metal mesh filter for under $6. It's this exact one.

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You can put a tablespoon-ish of coffee in it, make about two single cups out of it (if you really wanted to, I just make one because I'm picky), and then dump the coffee and start again. Not only are we not creating unending waste every day with used K-cups, we are not wasting any coffee in the process! As a bonus, it costs just a fraction of what the single serve cups did.

The coffee we were buying in bulk before was $22 for 80 cups. Not bad, but terrible coffee! Per serving it was (rounded up) about 28 cents a cup. If we each drink one cup a day, that's about $200/yr.

The new coffee we found at Aldi is $5 for like 2 lbs. I forget the amount of tablespoon servings, but I do know it's about 4 cents a cup, or $30/yr. $36 a year if you count our initial $6 investment in the insert. Now that's savings!

It's not much, really. The chance to reduce our household waste means almost as much to me as the chance to save the money.

Hope you enjoyed reading!