A city in Germany wants you to abandon your single-serve coffee cups.
In 2014, Keurig sold 9.8 billion non-recyclable K-cups. That's enough cups to circle the Earth almost 11 times over.
There are few things more satisfying on this planet than a hot cup o' joe. Coffee, I mean.
It lifts our spirits on the way to work. It gets us through that dreaded morning slog. It's, well...
Exactly. GIF via "The Mentalist."
In recent years, the single-serve K-cup (or whatever brand you choose) has quickly become a favorite method for delivering this heavenly elixir into our bodies as quickly and efficiently as possible. It better suits our unique, individual tastes than brewing an entire pot of coffee, and it cuts down on all that needless waste ... right? Nope.
Hamburg, Germany, just became the first city ever to ban single-use coffee cups from its government-run buildings because of how wasteful the cups are.
While the single-serve pods popularized by Keurig save us from having to dump the remainder of our coffee pots down the drain every day, the pods themselves are actually far more damaging to our environment.
The pods are made from a mixture of plastic and aluminum, and many of the world's recycling plants don't have the necessary resources to process them accordingly. There's also the issue of the cup's size, which at three grams, accounts for a third of the product's total weight.
Hello, you pretty little ... totally wasteful ... thing. Photo Illustration by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.
About 13% of Germany's citizens are daily drinkers of coffee made in a single-serve brewer, so the problem is quickly getting out of hand.
Hamburg has about 1.7 million, which means at least 221,000 single-serve cups are being disposed of by the day.
So in an effort to combat this K-cup epidemic, Hamburg government officials issued a series of purchasing regulations in January with the goal of making their city more sustainable and eco-friendly.
"These portion packs cause unnecessary resource consumption and waste generation, and often contain polluting aluminum," Jan Dub, spokesperson for the Hamburg Department of the Environment and Energy, said in a press conference held over the weekend.
It's not just Germany that has a serious caffeine problem.
GIF via "Futurama."
Here in the U.S., the percentage of households with single-serve coffee makers has jumped, from 15% in 2014 to 25% in 2015. In Western Europe and the United States, sales of single-serve cups have more than tripled in the past five years, with industry leader Keurig selling over 9.8 billion of them in 2014. And of those near-10 billion pods sold in 2014, only 5% were recyclable.
While Keurig has promised to produce a completely recyclable K-Cup by 2020, even its founder (and the inventor of the K-Cup), John Sylvan, admits that's an unrealistic goal.
"No matter what they say about recycling, those things will never be recyclable," Sylvan said in an interview with The Atlantic. "I feel bad sometimes that I ever did it."
In any case, a tip of the cap is due to Hamburg for recognizing a problem and taking preventive measures so quickly.
The conveniences we desire in life can often come at the cost of sustainability, unfortunately. It's one thing to say that you're "going green," but it's another thing entirely to actually stick by your convictions when they require sacrifices.
In this case, that "sacrifice" could be as small as occasionally brewing a pot of coffee for you AND your co-workers to share. You know, like human beings.
And besides, it's not like drip coffee is that hard to make, right?
Unless you're Dwight Schrute, that is. GIF via "The Office."
A Generation Jones teenager poses in her room.Image via Wikmedia Commons
An office kitchen.via 
An angry man eating spaghetti.via 
Gif of baby being baptized
Woman gives toddler a bath Canva
An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
- YouTube youtube.com
Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.