Best Plastic-Free Coffee Grinders

Beans and ground coffee pass through the hopper, the burrs, the grinding chamber, and the catch bin. The burrs themselves are steel or ceramic on any decent grinder, so they're not the concern - the plastic hides in the hopper and the catch bin. And ground coffee is oily and staticky: it clings to plastic, picks up static, and scatters everywhere. Manual hand grinders are the easy plastic-free route - a metal body, steel or ceramic burrs, and a metal or glass catch - while most electric grinders still put a plastic hopper and a static-prone plastic bin on either end of the grind path.

There's one piece of good news here that the rest of the kitchen doesn't get: grinding is a cold, brief contact. Beans sit in a hopper at room temperature for seconds, with none of the near-boiling dwell time that makes a plastic kettle reservoir or a drip machine's hot-water tank worth caring about. That doesn't make a plastic grind path irrelevant - static, staling, and oils in scratched plastic are all real - but it does mean this is a lower-stakes swap than the brewer or the kettle, and a good grinder with a plastic hopper is a reasonable thing to own.

Which half you want is mostly about volume and patience. Going electric used to mean accepting plastic; it doesn't anymore - a handful of single-dose grinders now build the entire coffee path in metal, and Simply Good Coffee's glass-and-steel machine goes further still. That's where most people are shopping, so it's where we start. If you're grinding one or two cups a day, a hand grinder is still the cheapest reliable way to get coffee out of a metal path, and for that use it's the whole answer.