Keurig just released a sustainability report announcing that the company plans to make all coffee pods recyclable by 2020, among other ecofriendly efforts. Even then, chances are the pod won’t be recycled because it’s too small, says Darby Hoover, senior resource specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. And for the small few that are recyclable, the aluminum lid must be separated from the cup, which also must be emptied of its wet grounds, for the materials to make it through the recycling process.
The rest of them are made up of a #7 composite plastic, which is nonrecyclable in most places. Green Mountain only makes 5 percent of its current cups out of recyclable plastic. If Green Mountain aims to have “a Keurig System on every counter,” as the company states in its latest annual report, that’s a hell of a lot of little cups.
Monkik plastic the noun project update#
To update that analogy: In 2013, Green Mountain produced 8.3 billion K-Cups, enough to wrap around the equator 10.5 times.
Journalist Murray Carpenter estimates in his new book, Caffeinated, that a row of all the K-Cups produced in 2011 would circle the globe more than six times. (And that’s to say nothing of the plastic and metal brewing systems, which if broken, aren’t that easy to recycle either.) By making each pod so individualized, and so easy to dispose of, you must also exponentially increase the packaging-packaging that ultimately ends up in landfills. Keurig systems take under a minute to brew coffee, and cleaning them is laughably easy: Just chuck the used coffee pod in the trash, then press a button, and a “cleansing brew” shoots hot water through the system to clear it of residue.īut critics warn that the packaging needed for these systems comes with environmental and health-related costs. What Keurig customers love, proclaims Green Mountain’s 2013 annual report, is the system’s “Quality, Convenience, and Choice”-and let’s be real, it’s convenience that trumps for most busy Americans. Keurig also has similar brewing systems and pods for tea and iced beverages, and will roll out a system for Campbell’s soup later this year.
The single-serve method has experienced impressive growth: According to the Seattle Times, while US consumers bought $132 million worth of coffee pods in 2008, they forked over $3.1 billion for them last year, compared to $6 billion for roasted coffee and $2.5 billion in instant coffee. Keurig would not tell me what types of plastic go into its #7 blend, saying the information was proprietary.
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