...which could easily have been solved by grinding the coffee the night before.
Or a manual grinder. I have a hand crank grinder I use for my coffee, though admittedly this is because I'm the only coffee drinker - I use an Aeropress to make single cups at a time. The kettle is louder than the grinder. Though, to be fair, my daughter does pester me for coffee beans to eat whenever she finds me making coffee - I can't say I'm a huge fan of raw coffee beans, but she loves them.
Also, any recommendations for environmentally friendly cat litter?
A couple acres and an outdoor cat? ;)
A researcher at the local university who specialises in climate related LCA analyzis always says that he doesn't like goals of reducing the total amount of garbage. Instead, we should focus on getting people to deliver all their stored junk to the recycling stations so we get the resources back into the loop. If we recycled all the precious metals in phones and other electronics people don't use anymore, maybe we could remove the market for some of the worst mines in Kongo?
Cobalt and rare earths are somewhat hard to recycle out of electronics, sadly. There's often no good way to split the stuff out, and electronics "recycling" is, more often than not, shipping them to some third world country where the valuable chips get removed and the rest gets burned. We'd be far, far better off learning to use those things far longer, and repairing them as they broke instead of replacing them.
=======
I'm working towards reduced environmental impact, though via a somewhat different route - I'm one hell of a pessimist and am aiming to be able to produce a large amount of our own food/energy from our property (two acres, but I can expand to the land around it if I need - I shouldn't need to). That has a side effect of reducing our environmental impact, because it involves locally produced energy/food.
The big project for 2019 is home solar. After getting obscene quotes for a basic grid tied system that doesn't actually reduce grid use much, I'm building my own system. Ground mount, battery backed (hybrid - I can export to grid if it's up, or run standalone if it's down or I feel like it), and designed to be flexible. I expect my power company will eliminate net metering within the next few years, so I'm designing to be able to self consume a lot of energy and basically adapt to what comes down the pipeline. It may or may not save me money, but it should dramatically reduce our energy use, and I should be "export only" for most of the spring, fall, and summer, if I choose to run that way. We're a rural, pure electric house, so that covers water, heat, and a good bit of our transportation energy (we've got a Volt that covers most driving on electric, with a tank or so of gas a month in the winter, somewhat less in the summer as it doesn't need the engine for heat as much). I work from the property, so my office impact is minimal (off grid/solar powered with lead acid, so fairly low embodied energy in the batteries).
What I
really should do is get my long range/high speed e-bike built - I've got about half the parts, but have been lazy about building it. It's a 20 mile round trip into town, and I live on a high speed rural road, so biking is a bit sketchy unless I take some long detours. Being able to cruise at 30-35mph reduces the speed delta massively, and also gives me power for some good lighting, while consuming far less energy than a car or motorcycle.
I've been working on the waste streams as well. Again, not as much for purely environmental reasons as for sanity and cost reasons. I
finally found a recycling center that takes most materials (and pays for corrugated cardboard and aluminum), though I still can't recycle glass anywhere. I haul recycling if I'm making a Home Depot or Lowes run, so it's more or less free to haul, and it keeps material out of our trash trailer, which is slowly extending the fill-time. It was 4 months, then 6 months, and I'm hoping to get a year on this fill (I'll probably haul it late in the year if it needs it or not, unless I think I can make it through winter - hauling it in the winter sucks).
The local food production side of things is a bit behind where I was hoping to be, but we have a garden, and will be expanding it. I also intend to build some greenhouses for aquaponics, and some more sheltered garden beds (screen-covered sides to keep the birds out, mostly, because WOW they destroy the garden in a hurry when things are sprouting). Compost bins exist, but are not working optimally right now - I need to do more work to get them up to temperature so I can kill seeds in our feedstock, which is heavily tumbleweed and cheatgrass.
It's a long project, but we've got the land area to be able to really reduce our impact a lot, and I'm working towards continuing to do so.