How To Clean Reusable Keurig Cups Without Compromising Your Garbage Disposal

Congratulations! You've made a huge step in cutting the waste you generate by opting out of single-use coffee pods. Purchasing refillable, reusable pods for your Keurig or other single-cup coffee maker not only keeps more recycling or trash out of the system, it also saves you money on your sips. Of course, reusable coffee pods present the conundrum of how to clean them for next time.

Coffee grounds aren't the easiest to get rid of without a mess. Putting coffee grounds down the drain is something you should never do; too many in your kitchen sink can lead to seriously clogged drains and damaged garbage disposals. Get that important little container ready for the next cup with either liners or a clever clean-out process that YouTuber Jeffrey Schmidt came up with involving a plastic cup and reusable mesh coffee filter. 

Both ways keep your sink safe, and a smart combo of both ideas will get the job done with nary an errant ground in sight. Keep running to the eco-friendly finish line by getting more use out of those grounds before they make it to the compost pile. There are genius ways to use coffee grounds in your yard and garden. There are even household items that you should be cleaning with coffee grounds.

If you want to go the paper filter route, there's a healthy variety of brands to choose from. Stay the sustainable course with unbleached paper filters that require fewer resources to produce. Add to your Amazon cart a box of Brew Addicts single-use unbleached coffee filters that will get you through 300 cups without much cleanup for $17, or really stock up with a box of 600 for a little over $30.

But even when you've got a compostable container that pops out of the pod easily, there are still the grounds left in other components of the reusable pod, especially the cap. No worries, you can just adopt the method our YouTuber shared. Enlist the help of a reusable filter basket for a drop coffee maker like this plastic-free one from YEOSEN, available at Amazon for $13. Rinse the cap over the basket so that the basket's mesh catches the grounds as they wash away.

Maybe you don't like the papery taste that can come with using paper filters and want to skip that step. Instead, find a small plastic cup that's about the same height as the removable basket from your reusable pod; Schmidt repurposed a cap from a bottle of laundry detergent that matched the basket's size well. Invert the grounds-filled basket into the plastic cup and knock it against your palm or lightly against the counter until the bulk of the grounds come out. To remove the remaining grounds, invert the single-use filter basket inside the larger mesh filter basket and run water through the two filters until the smaller one is grounds-free.