From good ole’ fashioned drip blend to a venti nonfat triple skinny caramel macchiato with extra whip, there are countless ways to enjoy your morning cup of Joe. But in recent years, a new brew has surfaced that spells bad news for the environment.
Keurig released its signature single-serving brewing system in 1998 in an attempt to capitalize on an American version of the popular European Nespresso system. Today, millions of Americans have traded in their old fashioned drip makers for a shiny, ultra convenient coffee-bot which can spit out that oh-so-precious liquid awareness in under a minute. As somebody who has difficulty even crossing the room before my morning coffee, I know how mind-numbingly slow my little drip maker seems to be when I start my day at 5:30 a.m.
So what could be wrong with buying into the new coffee craze? Faster is better, right? I’m only one person, my caffeine addiction can’t have that big of an impact.
Maybe not by myself, no. But when 13 percent of the U.S. population tosses one or two of those little plastic cups into the trash every single day, it starts to become a big problem.
In 2013, Keurig Green Mountain pumped out 8.5 billion K-cups; enough to wrap around Earth’s equator ten and a half times. That’s a heck of a lot of landfill space just to shave a few minutes off of your morning routine.
What’s worse, 95 percent of K-Cups are composed of no.7 composite plastic, a type few recycling centers will accept. And even if the average, blurry-eyed American were willing to take off the aluminum lid and scrape out the coffee grounds in the wee hours of the morning, the small few that are able to be recycled would likely be rejected due to their small size.
But it’s okay. Keurig is addressing that problem. According to their website, they plan to have 100 percent of K-Cups recyclable by 2020. Only five more years. Only around 42.5 billion more pieces of plastic tossed in a landfill, assuming they meet their 2013 sales numbers each year.
However, there are environmentally conscious options for the consumer who enjoys the irrefutable convenience of the coffee-bot. Third-party producers have managed to create recyclable, biodegradable and reusable cups.
Keurig, on the other hand, is focusing on far more important features. The new Keurig 2.0 comes with a fancy and hardly advertised digital rights management (DRM) system in their machines, fighting the good fight against the onslaught of coffee pirates by only allowing Keurig branded and licensed cups to work with the machine. For a company whose product’s main selling point is convenience, why Keurig thought driving people to need to hack their coffee maker to produce a non-K-Cup of coffee would be a good idea continues to evade me.
Hopefully, after being slapped with a $600 million lawsuit, receiving enormous consumer backlash and having their sales drop 12 percent in a single quarter with Darth Coffee 2.0’s release, Keurig will realize the fault in their actions as well.
Until then, I’ll happily spend an extra few minutes each morning listening to my archaic coffee maker gurgle away.
Kevin Ridder is a senior in environmental studies. He can be tweeted at @redinthehead99 or emailed at [email protected].
