I can already paint the picture for you. You’re standing in the coffee aisle noticing for the first time that there are brown coffee filters. These coffee filters claim to be more environmentally friendly but are they really?
Brown vs White Filters
Bleached Filters
The first thing you’ll probably notice about those brown filters is that they claim to be unbleached. “Oh my god I’ve been ingesting bleach all these years?!” No you haven’t. You see, all paper is naturally brown once it’s gone through the pulping process. This means that literally any white piece of paper you’ve ever used, or even seen, has been bleached during the fabrication process. Think of the difference between a sheet of printer paper and a brown paper lunch bag.
What you need to know is that the amount of bleaching solution is so tiny that it’s impossible for it to have any effect on your health. What it does to is help to disinfect the paper, and make it an inhospitable habitat for any microbes that may want to set up shop. Once upon a time, coffee filters were bleached with well, bleach (sodium hypochlorite). Perhaps sensing the negative connotation this had among consumers, man coffee filter producers now use oxygen to bleach the papers.
Unbleached Filters
Never one to miss a marketing opportunity, marketing execs quickly capitalized on the new health conscious craze that was ushered in in recent years, and coffee filters were no different. In a world where a lot of buzz is created around health and environmentalism, there was a clear marketing opportunity to market something as “All Natural”, “Environmentally Friendly” and “Healthier”. While an argument can be made that unbleached paper can biodegrade more easily, we all know that bleached paper isn’t really all that bad for the environment as tons of it is made to feed the millions of printers around the world without much of a word from environmentalists. I’ve yet to see anyone boycott loose leaf…
The one difference you will notice is in the price tag. The question of whether you want to pay a premium for this clever marketing tactic is yours to decide.
