Dear
EarthTalk: What is the environmental impact of those “K-Cups” everyone
seems to be using nowadays to make coffee at both home and office?
-- Chris B., Stamford, CT
K-Cups—those
little one-serving coffee containers that allow people to brew one cup at a
time in a specially designed Keurig brewing machine—are all the rage these
days. Each K-Cup is made up of a plastic outer container with one cup’s worth
of ground coffee and a small filter inside, capped off with a foil lid. They go
into Keurig brewing machines which pierce the bottom of the K-Cup with a nozzle
that then forces hot water through the coffee grounds and filter, and then out
into the drinker’s cup. K-Cups and the Keurig brewers are convenient and
require little to no clean-up while producing gourmet quality coffee for a
fraction of the price that a retail coffee shop would charge.
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| Credit: Aaron Paxson, courtesy Flickr |
Environmentalists’
beef with the Keurig system is in the single-use, non-recyclable nature of the
packaging, given the implications for our waste stream. The individual parts of
a K-Cup (plastic, paper and foil) could theoretically be recycled on their own,
but the combination is too small and messy for recycling facilities to be able
to sort. So our only choice is to throw the whole K-Cup pack, lock stock and
barrel, into the garbage. Each pound of coffee consumed sends 50 K-Cups to the
landfill. And with upwards of 17 million U.S. households and offices
possessing Keurig brewers these days, billions of K-Cups are already ending up
in landfills every year.
Keurig Green
Mountain,
the company behind the K-Cup revolution, is on the case about the bad
environmental reputation it is developing over the issue. As a first step, it
launched its Grounds to Grow On program in 2011 whereby office customers can
purchase K-Cup recovery bins and fill them up with spent K-Cups. When the boxes
are full, they are shipped to Keurig’s disposal partner, which turns the used
coffee grounds into compost and sends the rest out to be incinerated in a “waste-to-energy”
power plant. Critics point out, though, that waste-to-energy is hardly green
given the airborne pollutants released from incinerator smokestacks and the
fact that, in the words of Julie Craves of the
Coffee & Conservation blog, recycling is the enemy of the
never-ending stream of garbage needed to feed waste-to-energy facilities.
In
2012, Keurig Green Mountain,
realizing it still had a lot of work to do on sustainability matters, undertook
a lifecycle assessment across its product lines—and set ambitious
sustainability targets to achieve by 2020. Chief among them is to make all
K-Cups 100 percent recyclable. Other goals include ensuring responsible
sourcing for all its primary agricultural and
manufactured products, reducing life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of its brewed
beverages by 25 percent compared to the 2012 baseline, and achieving zero
waste-to-landfills its manufacturing and distribution facilities.
Those who love the Keurig system but are ready to forego
the environmental guilt sooner than 2020 do have some options. Julie Craves
reports that used K-Cups can actually be refilled with ground coffee and
reused. An easier option might be buying a reusable K-Cup—most of them are made
out of plastic with a stainless steel mesh filter. Still the best choice for
the environment, however, might be getting the old traditional coffee pot out
of storage and brewing up several cups at once—just like the old days.
EarthTalk® is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and
Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E
- The Environmental Magazine (www.emagazine.com). Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com.
