Are you waking up to the aroma of coffee percolating in your home? Or are you off to your favorite barista for a cup of Joe on your way to work? I am sitting here sipping my cuppa’ joe as I type this post dedicated to National Coffee Day on September 29. We all love our coffee, so let’s celebrate it by adopting the Everyday Eco-Habit of Going Coffee Cup-LESS.

Going Coffee Cup-LESS will help reduce litter, so it ties in nicely to this month’s Everyday Eco-Habit of Going Litter-LESS. In fact, just last year, roughly 624,878 plastic lids were collected during International Coastal Clean-up Day, many of those from single-use, disposable coffee cups. Many of you participated in September 15th’s cleanup day and I bet you saw some of these lids, as well as single-use disposable coffee cups. Did you know Americans throw away over 25 billion polystyrene coffee cups per year! If you stacked them all up, it would be about 701 meters high, 517 meters taller than the Seattle Space Needle!

While that’s a lot of waste stemming from just coffee cups, the good news is WE can do something about it. We can honor National Coffee Day by doing our part to stem the tide of coffee cup litter by adopting the easy Eco-Habit of Going Coffee Cup-LESS! Simply bring your own reusable coffee cup instead of using a single-use disposable coffee cup. Not only will this help reduce waste, but many reusable coffee cups keep your coffee warm way longer then the single-use disposable cups. Plus, most coffee shops offer you a discount for bringing in your reusable cup. Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee both offer a 10-cent discount every time you bring in your reusable cup and Coffee Bean gives you a 20-cent discount! I promised you could save some green while going green! Don't know where to get a reusable coffee mug? Hereis a list of some of my favs, including this new one launching from My Green Friend Klean Kanteen. Easy right? I am confident you can do this, and you will feel so much better about your coffee habit, knowing you are not contributing to the massive amount of litter plaguing our earth.

If you make your own coffee at home, rise and shine to this coffee stat: 1 in 3 Americans uses a single-cup coffee maker, resulting in millions of used coffee pods ending up in landfills. Fortunately, many of the companies who sell single-cup coffee makers, including Nespresso, Starbucks' Verismo pods, and Tassimo T-Disc pods, use recyclable pods (Keurig, the most popular of these companies, is striving for all K-Cups to be recyclable by 2020). All you have to do is go to their websites to find out how to recycle yours and adopt the Everyday Eco-Habit of recycling your coffee pods! Not sure if your pods can be recycled or how to recycle them? Check out this great article from Consumer Reports and this resource from Terracycle.

I hope you join me in celebrating National Coffee Day by Going Coffee Cup-LESS. It’s a perfect way to end this month’s Everyday Eco-Habit of Going Litter-LESS. I’m going to finish my morning java with My Green Friends Kim and Jen out of these awesome coffee canteens from Klean Kanteen. Send me a picture of you using a reusable coffee mug and Klean Kanteen will send you one too!