Not many people enjoy doing the dishes. If you use Paper Cups the majority of the time, you won't have nearly as many dishes to wash. This can be great all by itself, but if you choose to recycle the benefits can go way beyond a little less housework.

Many times you are able to find big dumpsters or bins out in the parking lots of grocery stores or other establishments. These containers are clearly marked as places where you're allowed to throw in your recyclable products. You don't have to talk to anyone, or pay any kind of fee. All you have to do is drive up and dump your bucket in.

When you have a family get-together, throw-away items are very often used so dishes do not have to be done. The entire family can spend that time together enjoying one another's company. No one has to spend their time 'doing the dishes', by hand or by filling the dishwasher.

Some people use nothing but cups made of paper. They are cheap, and you can take them just about anywhere. When drinking hot drinks, such as coffee or tea, you may get a sleeve to put over the cup to insure your drink stays hot. These kinds of drinking vessels are also great for picnics and other functions where a lot of people will be attending.

All kinds of recyclable products find their way into the recycle bin. Newspaper, magazines, cardboard boxes, plates, cups, and a variety of other items cuddle together to await the trip to the "big recycling bin in the sky". Humans produce a lot of waste by-products and putting them into the system to be turned into something else useful is a great idea.

If you can find a recyclable cup, if you care about the environment, it's the best kind of cup you can drink your coffee or tea from. Hot or cold, it doesn't matter. Your favorite beverage may taste a little sweeter when you know the cup your drinking out of doesn't have to be one of the many that are piling up in landfills.

With large corporate interest, the use of paper cups is declining and companies are becoming more interested in sustainable alternatives such as biodegradable cups.

Posted under Tea

When credit consumers take out a new financial service such as credit, a loan or new mortgage they are also offered Payment Protection Insurance which protects them if they experience difficulties in paying for the loan by means of unemployment, injury etc.

Banks aren't obliged to offer this service but if they do they are required to ensure they understand the background of the customer and are certain the PPI would cover them in the unforeseen.

Banks can exploit PPI in a few ways and the most common is simply allowing the customer to select PPI, simply by ticking a box and this releases the bank from the responsibility to correctly sell a customer the right product. If that customer happens to be unlucky enough to need the PPI, the chances are they will not be eligible for the product they have paid for.

The consumer would then remain unaware that they are completely ineligible for the product and if they did find themselves unable to make repayments they would not be provided with any insurance. Many thousands of customers have fallen on hard times only to find out there is no back up plan to pay their mortgage even though they thought they had planned ahead.

A second method is much worse, by means of signing a contract a customer can be unknowingly accepting to pay for PPI when buying a financial service; this is likely to be complexly written into the small print thus avoiding any legal indiscretion.

This course of action is a grey legal area but with the choice of the right solicitor it is more than possible to claim back all of your lost payments on PPI if you didn't explicitly choose to buy it.

Researchers are still trying to find easily produced, economically viable biodegradable cups but for now we will have to make do with the environmentally unfriendly insulated cups we are used to.

Posted under Tea

If you, like me, have ever walked into a Starbucks and laughed at the prices of their coffees then you would very much split your sides beyond repair if someone slammed you with a bill for $30 for a single cup of coffee, although you might need a sense of humour to drink coffee derived from the processed faeces of a south-east Asian monkey-esque animal.

But there are some that take their coffee seriously enough to spend upwards of $600/pound for the delicacy which has one of the most unusual methods of production. It starts with the beans of coffee berries from the islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali and Sulawesi in the Indonesian Archipelago and it is eaten by the native Asian Palm Civet. The berries pass through the digestive tract of the Civet and into its stomach where proteolytic enzymes seep into the beans.

Once the beans are excreted, they are gathered, thoroughly washed and dried in the sun before lightly roasted. Apparently this process yields an aromatic coffee without bitterness. Chris Rubin, coffee critic has said, "The aroma is rich and strong, and the coffee is incredibly full bodied, almost syrupy. It's thick with a hint of chocolate, and lingers on the tongue with a long, clean aftertaste."

The ridiculously overpriced poop-coffee sells the most in Japan and the US, a small cafe in the hills outside Townsville in Queensland Australia put the drink on its menu at just over 50 Australian dollars and received national publicity.

Kopi Luwak was first commercially exported out of south-east Asia in the mid 1980s but was not made popular until the 2007 film 'The Bucket List'. In the film, arrogant multi-millionaire Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson) adored the beans claiming it was the "best coffee in the world". Later in the film Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman) reveals to Nicholson how the coffee is made, to which they both share in the amusement.

Today's fast food society has coffee on-the-go in hot paper cups or vending cups. But Kopi Luwak is served in a small delicate porcelain cup from a brass decanter, all to add to the experience I guess.

Posted under Tea