A Short Essay on the Fight Against Capsule Coffee

First, I want to say this up front.....I hate capsule coffee.  When I'm at some hotel, and there's the Nespresso coffee machine and the six-odd choices for coffee....I just pass.  There's two issues....the taste just isn't there, and I've seen the video of the internal guts of these machines.....where it's questionable if 'clean' or not.

Germans like the capsule coffee trend.  Some news reports indicate that they consume three billion such capsule coffees per year.  For Nespresso, if true, that would make a ton of profit off one country with eighty million residents.

The Green Party has taken an odd position.  They think the trend of these little capsules ending up in a recycle bin is silly.  So, they want a national tax added on.....to discourage people from using the capsule coffee.

The talk?  Well....it's mostly about this huge amount of aluminium involved and how it's a waste.  It's the kind of chatter that four kids would engage upon....when someone brought up a chocolate bar and the way that it's packaged.

The Nespresso folks will say it plain and clear.....for this small volume of coffee and the ability to always produce the same quality of taste....this is the only way to bring it to the consumer.  They've put tons of research into this and have a point.

A tax on the capsules?  First, you'd have to get this into the SPD mind and hope that in the next election.....somehow, the Greens and the SPD will end up as a partner coalition (after November of 2017).  The German public?  It's hard to say how they'd react.  The Nespresso folks may shift over to some cheap plastic and go down a step in terms of quality....just to avoid the tax.  Eventually, enough consumers would complain about lower quality coffee and blame the Greens for making this possible.

So, I have my doubts that this will ever occur.  But it does demonstrate the continued trend of some German worrying about things which aren't worth worrying about.  Eventually, some Green will worry about the number of sheets of toilet paper that you use for your private business, and then you will kinda aggravated about this type of behavior.