Hamburg, Germany's second-largest city, has just taken a significant step in the fight against unsustainable waste, announcing that it will ban the use of single-serve coffee pods from all government-run buildings, according to FOX News.

Coffee pods have grown in popularity in recent years, bolstered by the convenience that they offer. However, as convenient as they are, coffee pods are notoriously difficult to recycle, mainly because the pods themselves are made of a mixture of plastic and aluminum.

In an announcement over the weekend, Jan Dube of the Hamburg Department of the Environment and Energy stated that the pods are causing unnecessary resource consumption, reports The Examiner.

"These portion packs cause unnecessary resource consumption and waste generation, and often contain polluting aluminium. It's 6 grams of coffee in 3 grams of packaging. We in Hamburg thought that these shouldn't be bought with taxpayers' money," Dube said.

It is estimated that thousands of the little pods are buried in landfills every day. In fact, it is believed that if all the coffee pods buried in landfills are placed end-to-end, they would make a chain long enough to circle the globe 12 times over, reports The Business Insider.

Of course, Hamburg's sanctions against the use of coffee pods only apply to government-owned buildings. However, the German city's stance on the waste issue caused by the non-recyclable pods is a definitive step towards combating excessive consumption nonetheless.

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