We all need a morning pick-me-up sometimes. People swear by their morning coffee or matcha to give them the energy they need to get through the day. Others enjoy decaf coffee or herbal tea as a more calming morning beverage. Either way, there are many ways to make your morning ritual more sustainable. These are easy strategies you can implement right now to create less waste and support ethical practices.

Fair Trade Certifications

 

1. Source Coffee with Fair Trade Certification

From bean to cup, coffee goes through a long journey. There are farmers, exporters, importers, roasters, buyers, suppliers, coffeeshops, and more stakeholders involved with the process of producing your cup of joe. It may change hands up to 100 times (Calaway 2020)! Due to this fact, there are many opportunities for exploitation. Migrant and indigenous workers alike are subjected to harsh treatment and denied their labor rights, according to the Human Trafficking Source website. The water and fertilizer in the growing process, gas in the transportation process, and electricity in the roasting process add up to contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. In order to promote greater social justice and environmental sustainability, there’s a certification you can look for when buying coffee!

You may have heard of Fair Trade certification, but if you are like me, you might not be sure exactly what it is. According to the Fair Trade USA website, Fair Trade coffee is “certified according to rigorous Fair Trade standards that promote sustainable livelihoods, safe working conditions, protection of the environment, and strong, transparent supply chains.” Fair Trade promotes sustainability by eliminating deforestation, prioritizing stewardship, and enhancing biodiversity. Sustainability isn’t all about the environment though! Fair Trade is ensuring that the people involved with the production of coffee can sustain their livelihoods too. Looking for this certification is important to ensure farmers earn fair prices in the market, working conditions are safe, and child labor is prevented. Although the process isn’t perfect in preventing all harms, it’s a good starting place.

 

Reusable K-Cups

 

2. Use Reusable K-Cups

For those who make coffee at home, the disposable coffee pods commonly referred to as “k-cups” can be a major source of waste. Coined by the coffee maker brand Keurig, k-cups are convenient in that you can place one in the coffee maker, brew your coffee, and throw it away without having to do any additional prep or clean-up. However, there is a price to the convenience of single use coffee pods. 50 billion k-cups end up in the trash in the United States every year (Baer 2025). That’s a massive amount of waste created that is easily preventable.

Enter the reusable K-Cup! Many companies, including Keurig themselves, make reusable k-cups that are readily available at major retailers and grocery stores. You fill the k-cup with a scoop of your favorite bag of coffee grounds (make sure to source sustainably, looking for the Fair Trade certification!), pop it in your coffee maker, and brew your coffee. After you’ve brewed your morning cup, you just dump the grounds in the compost and rinse out the cup. That’s it! All it takes is a few extra seconds to help cut back on billions of pieces of plastic waste. My family switched from disposable to reusable a couple years ago, and we love it. We buy our grounds from Kitty Town Coffee, a company that donates money to feed a cat in a shelter for a week for every bag of coffee purchased. While their coffee is not certified Fair Trade, they use a direct trade sourcing method that still ensures farmers receive fair prices. There are lots of local sustainable coffee roasters to support around the city as well to fill your reusable k-cups!

Loose leaf tea strainers

3. Choose Compostable Tea Bags or Loose Leaf Tea

A nice hot cup of tea can be just what we need sometimes to start our morning, unwind at night, or stay warm on a chilly day. No matter the reason or the season, drinking tea using single use tea bags adds to the massive amount of waste our society creates and normalizes. You may not know it, but disposable tea bags usually contain plastic. Even though the tea bag may be made from paper and plant fibers, polypropylene is used to seal the bags. It is a lightweight thermoplastic polymer known for its durability in high temperatures. Research published in the peer-reviewed Environmental Science & Technology journal showed that one bag of tea released about 11.6 billion microplastic particles and 3.1 billion nanoplastic particles into water at brewing temperatures (Hernandez et. al 2019). So not only are single use tea bags creating waste, they are also potentially poisoning us with microplastics. Brands like Tazo, Twinings, Yogi, Teavana, and Lipton contain plastic, so watch out!

Tea companies are combatting microplastics by creating plastic-free tea bags and wrappers. However, some of these are still not compostable. The brands Bigelow, Traditional Medicinals, and Celestial Seasonings make compostable tea bags, but not all wrappers are compostable. There’s another alternative that goes even further in creating zero waste: loose leaf tea strainers! Much like the k-cup process, you can make a one time purchase of a loose leaf tea strainer, fill it up with your favorite loose leaf tea, and steep it in hot water whenever you’re craving a cup. Once all the flavor has been steeped out of the leaves, you can compost them, creating no waste throughout the whole process. Loose leaf tea tastes better, is healthier, less wasteful, and can even be cheaper through buying in bulk.

Variety of vegan milk

4. Choose climate friendly milks and creamers

Oat, almond, soy, coconut, macadamia, and more! There is a plethora of options when it comes to adding milk and creamer to your morning brew that have a smaller environmental footprint than traditional dairy milks. Dairy is a $753 billion industry in America, and because of this, the pollution and carbon emissions from the industry are often not talked about. Sustainability specialist Emiko Uohara uncovered the environmental impact of many different types of milks in her blog post, “Moo-ve Over Cows: the Environmental Footprint of Milk Alternatives.” Dairy milk impacts not only greenhouse gas emissions, freshwater use, and eutrophication, “[t]he agricultural land needed for dairy milk is over 11.5 times greater than its closest competitor [oat milk]…. The evidence is clear: any of these milk alternatives are viable replacements for dairy milk and will save the planet from water scarcity, greenhouse gas emissions, eutrophication, and excessive land usage” (Uohara 2025). Whether you are just adding a splash of creamer or filling up your latte cup, utilizing nondairy milk will make your routine more sustainable. There used to be slim pickings when it came to plant-based alternatives, but the market has expanded so every grocery store carries an option, with most grocery stores offering multiple brands and flavors. I personally would recommend the brand Silk which has a variety of options!

A mug in front of a coffee shop

5. Bring your own mug to a coffee shop (often for a discount!)

At USF, an exciting policy was just reintroduced that furthers USF’s mission of zero waste! You can bring your own reusable mug to any coffee shop on campus for a 25 cent discount. This program works at all cafés on campus: Market Café and the Grind Down in the UC first floor, the Law Café, and Open Door Café in the Lone Mountain dining hall. Even though the cafés do usually offer compostable to-go cups—and composting is a great option to enhance sustainability—you can take your sustainability to the next level by bringing your own mug. That way you aren’t creating a demand for the extraction of new raw materials from the environment, which always has a negative environmental footprint.

Bringing your own mug is also a great way to save money! Even though it seems like a small amount, it really adds up over time. If you buy a drink at the café once per week all year and bring your own mug, you’ll be saving $9. If you buy a drink every school day all year, you’ll be saving $45. That’s around 7 drinks for free! And who doesn’t want a free drink?

All in all, there are many ways to take your morning brew to the next level of sustainability. Between mugs, coffee grounds, tea bags, milks and creamers, there’s a lot to consider. However, keeping these five steps in mind, you are equipped with the knowledge to make more sustainable decisions!

 

References

Bear, V. M. (2025). How Many K-Cups Are Disposed Of In Landfills? Antipollution Plan. https://antipollutionplan.com/how-many-k-cups-are-disposed-of-in-landfills.html

Calaway, A. (2020). There Could be Labor Exploitation in Your Coffee Cup: Here’s How It Got There. Human Trafficking Search. https://humantraffickingsearch.org/there-could-be-labor-exploitation-in-your-coffee-cup-heres-how-it-got-there/

Fair Trade Certified Coffee: What It Is & Why It’s Important. Fair Trade Certified. https://www.fairtradecertified.org/what-we-do/what-we-certify/coffee/

Laura, H. M., Xu, E. G., Larson, H. C.E., Tahara, R., Maisuria, V. B., & Tufenkji, N. (2019). Plastic Teabags Release Billions of Microparticles and Nanoparticles into Tea. Environmental Science & Technology, 51(21). https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b02540

Emiko, Uohara (2024).  Moo-ve Over Cows: the Environmental Footprint of Milk Alternatives. https://usfblogs.usfca.edu/sustainability/2024/12/03/moo-ve-over-cows-the-environmental-footprint-of-milk-alternatives/