There are Keurig machines in about 40 million homes in the US Single-serve coffee brewing system – which allows consumers to make one cup of coffee at a time by inserting a pod into the slot and pressing a button – has increased in popularity since the early 2000s.
Inevitably, this leads to a lot of waste.
Every cup made with java creates confusion: what to do with the coffee pod that produced it. For starters, can it be recycled? The answer, in Keurig’s case, is not really. The company’s single-use coffee pods – also known as K-cups – are made from polypropylene plastic, which experts warn is not as recyclable as consumers have been led to think. Two of the country’s largest recycling companies have said they don’t accept K-cup pods, and one environmental group calculated that if you stacked all the K-cup pods in landfills together, they could easily circle the globe ten times. .
A new coffee pod company claims to have created a solution to Keurig’s plastic waste problem. Cambio Roasters, which launched in September, offers a Keurig-compatible coffee pod made of aluminum — which, unlike plastic, is infinitely recyclable. Cambio is led by a team of former Keurig employees, including founder and CEO Kevin Hartley, formerly chief innovation officer at Keurig Green Mountain, as the company was formerly known. “This is, in our opinion, the most exciting innovation in coffee since the K-cup,” Hartley said during Cambio’s launch day press conference.
Experts, however, aren’t sure Cambio understands how big of a problem K-cups are for curbside recycling systems.
“In reality, plastic is not a good choice,” said Jeremy Pare, a visiting professor of business and the environment at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. But even aluminum, with all its advantages, “will still have problems.”
Part of the difficulty in creating a truly recyclable packaging option – for almost any consumer good – is the highly fragmented nature of America’s recycling landscape. “There are over 10,000 recycling programs in the US,” said Pare, who is also a member of the Plastic Pollution Working Group at Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability. “However, at the same time, only one-fourth of the population in the US can recycle” (Pare lives in one such community that does not have an official recycling program, other than Augusta, Maine.) In the US, the question of whether an item can be recycled can only be accurately answered at the local level.
Another problem is the plastic design of many K-cup pods. Sustainability concerns have followed the Keurig brand closely as it has grown. (Once it started, Keurig was acquired by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters in 2006; in 2018, Keurig Green Mountain merged with Dr Pepper Snapple to become Keurig Dr Pepper.) Keurig began selling polypropylene K-cups pods in 2016 , with a goal of making 100 percent of K-cup pods “recyclable” by 2020. But the company has run into trouble for saying it can be recycled. In 2018, a California resident sued Keurig alleging that the K-cup pods could be reused after the foil lid was removed and the coffee grounds were washed or thrown out — leading to Keurig agreeing to pay $10 million in a class action settlement. And in September of this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Keurig with falsely claiming the pods were “effectively recyclable.” (Keurig settled the lawsuit by agreeing to pay a $1.5 million fine.)
Hartley, who left Keurig in 2017, knew consumers wanted a plastic-free K-cup option — and after years of prototypes and testing, he and his team settled on aluminum as the easiest to recycle. Aluminum also lacks oxygen, causing coffee to lose its flavor over time. “Whenever we brew a cup of coffee, it tastes just like the roastmaster intended,” says Hartley.
Cambio is not the first coffee company to simultaneously choose to ditch plastic or invest in a circular economy. Nespresso, the instant coffee company owned by the Nestlé Group, has been making its capsules out of aluminum for over 30 years. In 2020, Nespresso announced that its pods will be made from 80 percent recycled aluminum, and claims its recycling rate is 32 percent.
But Nespresso pods only work in Nespresso machines. Because Cambio coffee pods are designed to work with Keurig models, Hartley hopes to give consumers what they want “without having to buy a new brewer.”
Cambio also allows users to reverse the lid and dispose of grounds before recycling. Nespresso lids are difficult to remove, and the company instructs users to recycle their pods as-is, grounds and all — but they’re only approved for curbside recycling in New York City and Jersey City, where a designated recycling contractor cleans them beforehand. I process them. (Nespresso customers can also send used pods to the manufacturer for recycling, or drop them off at Nespresso stores.)
Unfortunately, replacing plastic with aluminum doesn’t automatically solve the problem of recyclability of K-cup pods, experts say. What really prevents coffee pods, regardless of what they are made of, from having a second life is their size.
After collection, the recyclables are sorted at a facility known as a materials recovery facility, or MRF. MRFs are not equipped to collect small items – the general rule is that they cannot handle anything smaller than a credit card – so small items placed in recycling bins often end up sent to landfills. “K-cups are so small that they fall through” the machine at many recycling centers, Pare said. “So without separating” the coffee pods from the waste “individually, there is no good way to recycle them.”
Cambio’s approach to this is twofold. First, the company says it wants consumers to stack used K-cup pods together — and squeeze them closed — to overcome the size requirements of recycling centers. Three or more used K-cup pods should form a single piece of aluminum large enough to fit into a machine at recycling facilities, Hartley said. (These instructions do not currently appear on Cambio’s packaging or website.)
Cambio says it is also making a machine that will make packing and squeezing used K-cups easier. “Think of this device as an easy way for consumers to put cups together and throw them in their recycling bin,” Hartley said. He added that the company has applied for a patent for a second generation of Cambio pods that can be “snapped” together after use.
Jan Dell, a chemical engineer and founder of an environmental nonprofit, said, “I don’t think aluminum pods are a sensible development,” citing their small size as a barrier to acceptance and sorting using curbside recycling systems. “Think of pods like confetti: it’s impossible to collect a copy.”
Cambio disagreed with Dell’s explanation for the switch to aluminum, pointing out that currently, no single-use pods are recyclable, while aluminum is infinitely recyclable. “For Cambio and consumers, these two facts are important.” Hartley also shared that work to ensure Cambio’s compliance with statewide recycling programs is “ongoing.” The company plans to conduct trials with MRFs in certain markets “as soon as possible.”
In response to a request for comment, a Keurig Dr. Pepper spokesperson said, “We know our consumers want convenience and less waste.” They shared that the company has “simplified our pods to reduce the amount of plastic used,” and “increased recycling options,” including a soon-to-be-launched program where customers will be able to send used pods to Keurig for recycling. The spokesperson also said the company is “continuing to explore” other “progressive” packaging options.
Dell leads the non-profit organization The Last Beach Cleanup, which focuses on fighting plastic pollution. The ultimate solution to Keurig’s plastic footprint, he said, is a product that eliminates “the need to collect anything that comes back from customers,” such as a fiber-based pod that can be attached to grounds.
Keurig is currently testing a plant-based pod format that won’t contain plastic or aluminum, and the company expects it to be proven viable, according to a Keurig Dr Pepper spokesperson. Hartley said he has worked on that product for years, calling it “an amazing new design.”
But these coffee pucks, which are not yet available for sale, will require an entirely new machine to operate. “It’s going to be a long time before America gets rid of 40 or 50 million brewers and buys 40 or 50 million new brewers,” Hartley said. He added, talking about his time with Keurig, “I’m not going to say publicly how much money we spent to start from zero and have 50 million American families who love their Keurigs. But it’s a big climb, and it takes decades.”
In an interview with The Atlantic in 2015, the K-cup founder said, “I sometimes feel bad that I ever did it.” As the market for single-use coffee brewers grows, so will its impact on the environment, unless its products are radically rethought and redesigned. Keurigs and Nespresso machines are marketed as both convenience and convenience, a combination that is likely to continue to draw in new market segments.
But eco-conscious coffee brewers can rest easy in the knowledge that you don’t need a Keurig or Nespresso machine to make one cup of coffee at a time; any coffee maker can be single-serve if you only use the water and coffee you really need. No pods needed – maybe just a filter.
This article first appeared on the nonprofit Grist, an independent media organization dedicated to telling stories about climate solutions and a fairer future. Learn more at Grist.org.
Source link
