K-Cups Recycled

K-Cups: They Can’t Be Recycled, So Now What?

The single-cup coffee craze is creating a dilemma in our landfills.

Let’s face it: Americans love their coffee! I’m anything but an exception to this rule. The sight of Dave Fidlin in the morning without his coffee: Well, let’s just say, it’s not pretty!
Over time, the majority of us have also ratcheted up our snobbery in coffee selections. Again, I’m far from exempt on this! Instant coffee? No way! How about making a pot of ground coffee? I’ll pass - the flavor seemingly fades too quickly.
In short: I much prefer the single-cup options that provide a fresh, satisfying, flavorful experience each and every time.
This desire to have a robust cup of Joe, time and time again, is what has spurred the popularity of the K-Cup, the plastic coffee container that is designed to work in concert with Vermont-based parent company Green Mountain Coffee’s single-cup coffee makers under the brand name of Keurig.
There’s one dilemma to those K-Cups: They are winding up in landfills — quite a few of them, as a matter of fact. Most of those plastic containers are not yet recyclable. So, once you’ve had your hot liquid cup of Joe, straight from the heavens, there are few options but to throw that plastic container straight into the trash can.
Green Mountain, a publicly traded company, has trumpeted to investors its surging sales in recent years. In the company’s 2013 annual report to investors, Brian P. Kelley, president and CEO, laid out Green Mountain’s rapid income growth. In 2009, Green Mountain notched $786,135 in net sales for all its products. Fast forward to 2013, and the figures swell to $4.35 million.
While not all of that income is directly attributed to K-Cups themselves, the plastic product does weigh heavily on Green Mountain’s bottom line. In a March 2014 article in Mother Jones, author Maddie Oatman ran some math, freshening figures from journalist Murray Carpenter’s book, “Caffeinated,” that asserted a row of all the K-Cups produced in 2011 would run rings around the planet more than six times.
“To update that analogy: In 2013, Green Mountain produced 8.3 billion K-Cups - enough to wrap around the equator 10.5 times,” Oatman writes. “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.”
The rapid rise of Green Mountain, Keurig coffee makers and those infamous K-Cups has not gone unnoticed with environmental advocates. Case in point: A nonprofit organization, Kill the Cup, was launched by a group of MBA students in 2013.
Kill the Cup actually takes a far wider view beyond K-Cups. Through a variety of different campaigns, the organization has brought awareness to the reality of many of today’s disposable coffee cups not being recyclable or biodegradable.
The move toward single-cup coffee makers - Keurig and others like it - has transformed the marketplace in a very short period of time. As outlined in a March 2015 article in The Atlantic, nearly one in every three American homes has what is oftentimes referred to as a pod-based coffee machine that makes brewing with K-cups possible.
In a twist of irony, John Sylvan, the Boston-based inventor of the pod-based coffee machine, says he is not a coffee aficionado, as outlined in the Atlantic report. Even more ironic: Sylvan told the publication he feels a certain degree of remorse toward developing a product that has led to a quandary in many of today’s landfills. But he also asserted he sought out other environmentally friendly products from the get-go.
In the Atlantic piece, Monique Oxender, Green Mountain’s chief sustainability officer, is quoted as saying, “I gotta be honest with you - we’re not happy with where we are either. We have to get a solution, and we have to get it in place quickly.”
To be fair to Green Mountain, the company has begun dipping its toes into the pool of sustainable practices, as evidenced by its report that 5 percent of its current K-Cups are made of recyclable plastic (the remaining 95 percent, as of writing this, are made of a No. 7 composite plastic that cannot be recycled in most corners of the world).
CEO Kelley also has backed a companywide sustainability report that announces a number of eco-friendly efforts, including a plan to convert all K-Cup packaging to be recyclable by 2020. Kelley asserts the company also is exploring packing that is biodegradable and can be composted.
But in the short term, Green Mountain will likely continue manufacturing those non-recyclable plastic K-Cups, meaning more and more of the plastic containers will populate landfills.
So, the dilemma is this: Is there a way to satisfy your coffee fix and still be kind to the planet? The answer: Yes!
On the environment-themed website Grist, columnist Umbra addresses some of the alternatives to an office worker bee who wants to adopt a more sustainable practice among herself and her co-workers.
“(A) reusable filter may be the greenest option, as it does not involving trashing your Keurig machine or buying a new coffeemaker,” Umbra writes. “If your coworkers can be persuaded to keep their gourmet grounds of choice in the office kitchen, they can still brew their favorite obscure Italian roasts, just with a little more effort.”
In addition to the reusable filter that is similar to some of the products on the market for traditional coffee makers, another green-friendly option is to explore products outside the Green Mountain marketplace.