
By Frida Garza, Grist
There’s a Keurig machine in some 40 million households in the U.S. Single-serve coffee brewing systems — which allow consumers to make just one cup of coffee at a time by feeding a pod into a slot and pressing a button — have soared in popularity since the early 2000s.
Inevitably, this leads to a lot of trash.
Every cup of java brewed creates a conundrum: what to do with the coffee pod that produced it. To start, 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 of polypropylene plastic, a material that experts warn is not as recyclable as consumers have been led to think.
Two of the country’s largest recycling companies have said they do not accept K-cup pods, and one environmental group calculated that if you lined up all the K-cup pods in the world’s landfills side by side, they would comfortably circle the globe 10 times.
A new coffee pod company claims to have developed a solution to Keurig’s plastic waste problem. Cambio Roasters, which launched in September, offers a Keurig-compatible coffee pod that’s made out of aluminum — which, unlike plastic, is infinitely recyclable. Cambio is led by a team of former Keurig employees, including founder and CEO Kevin Hartley, who was previously a chief innovation officer at Keurig Green Mountain, as the company was formerly known. “This is, in our view, the most exciting innovation in coffee since the K-cup,” said Hartley during a launch-day press call for Cambio.
Experts, however, aren’t sure that Cambio understands just how big of a problem K-cups pose to curbside recycling systems.
“Really, plastic is just not a good option,” said Jeremy Pare, a visiting professor of business and environment at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. But even aluminum, with all its benefits, is “still going to have issues.”
Part of the difficulty of creating a truly recyclable packaging option — for just about any consumer good — is the severely fragmented nature of the American recycling landscape. “There are over 10,000 recycling systems in the U.S.,” said Pare, who is also a member of the Plastic Pollution Working Group at Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability. “And yet, at the same time, only a quarter of the population has access to recycling in the U.S.” (Pare lives in one such community with no formal recycling program, just outside of Augusta, Maine.) In the U.S., the question of whether something is recyclable can only accurately be answered on a local level.
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