Your Keurig coffee pods are never recycled

There is a Keurig machine in some. 40 million homes in the US Single-serve coffee brewing systems, which allow consumers to brew just one cup of coffee at a time by inserting a capsule into a slot and pressing a button, have gained popularity since the early 2000s.

Inevitably, this generates a lot of garbage.

Every brewed cup of coffee creates a puzzle: what to do with the coffee capsule that produced it. To begin with, can it be recycled? The answer, in the case of Keurig, is really no. The company’s single-use coffee pods, also known as K-cups, are made of polypropylene plastic, a material that Experts warn that it 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 next to each other, I would comfortably go around the world 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 made of aluminum that, unlike plastic, is infinitely recyclable. Cambio is led by a team of former Keurig employees, including founder and CEO Kevin Hartley, who was previously chief innovation officer at Keurig Green Mountain, as the company was previously known. “This is, in our opinion, the most exciting innovation in coffee since the K-cup,” Hartley said during a press conference on Cambio’s launch day.

Experts, however, aren’t sure Cambio understands what a big problem K-cups pose for curbside recycling systems.

“In reality, plastic is just not a good option,” said Jeremy Pare, visiting professor of business and environment at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. But even aluminum, with all its benefits, “will still have problems.”

Part of the difficulty in creating a truly recyclable packaging option (for almost any consumer good) is the severely fragmented nature of the recycling landscape in the United States. “There are more than 10,000 recycling systems in the United States,” 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 United States” (Pare lives in one such community without a formal recycling program, outside Augusta, Maine). The question of whether something is recyclable can only be answered accurately at the local level.

Another problem is the plastic composition of most K-cup pods. Sustainability concerns have closely followed the Keurig brand as it has grown. (Once a small startup, 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 started selling K-cups capsules made of polypropylene in 2016, with the aim of make 100 percent of K-cup pods “recyclable” by 2020. But the company has had problems promoting recyclability. In 2018, a California resident sued Keurig for claiming that K-cup pods could be recycled after removing the aluminum lid and rinsing or throwing away the coffee grounds, resulting in Keurig agree to pay $10 million in class action settlement. And in September of this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission accused Keurig of falsely claiming the pods “can be recycled effectively.” (Keurig settled the claim 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 prototyping and testing, he and his team settled on aluminum as an easier-to-recycle alternative. Aluminum is also resistant to oxygen, which causes coffee to lose its flavor over time. “Every time we make a cup of coffee, it tastes exactly as the roaster intended,” Hartley said.

Cambio is not the first single-serve coffee company to choose to ditch plastic or invest in circularity. Nespresso, a popular single-serve coffee company owned by the Nestlé Group, has made its capsules from aluminum. for more than 30 years. In 2020, Nespresso announced that its capsules would be made of 80 percent recycled aluminumand claims that its overall recycling rate is 32 percent.

But Nespresso capsules 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 coffee maker.”

Cambio also allows users to remove the lid and discard the ground coffee before recycling it. nespresso capsule The caps are difficult to remove.and the company instructs users to recycle its pods as is, soil and all, but they are only approved for curbside recycling in new york city and Jersey Citywhere a designated recycling contractor cleans them before reprocessing them. (Nespresso consumers can also send used capsules to the manufacturer for recycling or drop them off at Nespresso stores.)

Unfortunately, swapping plastic for aluminum doesn’t automatically solve the K-cup pods’ recyclability crisis, experts say. What really prevents coffee pods, regardless of their material, from having a second life is their size.

After collection, recyclables are sorted at a facility known as a materials recovery facility or MRF. MRFs are not equipped to collect small items; A general rule is that they can’t handle anything. smaller than a credit card – and that’s why small items placed in recycling bins often end up being sent to landfills. “K-cups are so small that they fall off” the machinery at many recycling facilities, Pare said. “So, other than separating “coffee capsules from the waste stream” individually, there is no good way to recycle them.”

Cambio’s approach to solving this problem is two-pronged. First, the company says it wants consumers to stack used K-cup pods and then close them tightly to exceed the size requirements of many recycling facilities. Three or more used K-cup pods should create a piece of aluminum large enough to pass through the machinery at recycling facilities, Hartley says. (These instructions do not currently appear on the packaging or on the Cambio website.)

Cambio says it is also developing a device that will make it easier to stack and pinch used K cups. “Think of this device as an easy way for consumers to group cups together and then throw them in the recycling bin,” Hartley said. He added that the company has applied for patents for second-generation Cambio capsules that can be “joined together” after use.

Jan Dell, a chemical engineer and founder of a nonprofit environmental organization, said, “I don’t think aluminum capsules are a significant improvement,” citing their small size as a barrier to being accepted and sorted through recycling systems in the US. sidewalks. “Think of the pods as confetti: it’s impossible to pick them up again.”

Cambio disagreed with Dell’s characterization of the shift to aluminum, noting that currently, essentially no single-use plastic capsules are recycled, while aluminum can be recycled infinitely. “For Cambio and consumers, these two facts are significant.” Hartley also shared that work to ensure Cambio’s compatibility with recycling programs across the country is “ongoing.” The company plans to test MRF in specific markets “as soon as possible.”

In response to a request for comment, a Keurig Dr Pepper spokesperson said, “We know our consumers want simplicity and less waste.” They shared that the company has “been lightweighting our pods to reduce the amount of plastic used,” as well as “increasing options to recycle them,” including a soon-to-launch program where customers will be able to send their used pods to Keurig for disposal. recycling. The spokesperson also said the company is “continually exploring” more “sustainable packaging” options.

Dell leads the nonprofit The Last Beach Cleanup, which focuses on combating plastic pollution. The ultimate solution to Keurig’s plastic footprint, he said, is a product that eliminates “the need to pick up anything from customers,” such as a fiber-based pod that can be composted along with ground coffee.

Keurig is currently testing a plant-based pod format that will be plastic- and aluminum-free, and the company hopes it will be certified compostable, according to a Keurig Dr Pepper spokesperson. Hartley said he worked on that product for many years and called it “an amazing innovation.”

But these coffee discs, which are not yet available for sale, will require a completely new machine to run. “It will be a long time before the United States throws away 40 or 50 million breweries and buys 40 or 50 million new breweries,” Hartley said. He added, referring to his time with Keurig, “I won’t say publicly how much money we spent to start from scratch and have 50 million American households love their Keurigs. But it is a great advance and it takes decades.”

In an interview with the Atlantic in 2015, the inventor of the K cup He said, “Sometimes I feel bad for doing it.” As the market single-serve coffee makers grows, so will its impact on the environment, unless its products are somehow radically reinvented and redesigned. Keurigs and Nespresso machines are marketed as convenient and luxurious, a combination that will likely continue to attract new market segments.

But environmentally conscious coffee makers can rest easy knowing that they don’t need a Keurig or Nespresso machine to brew one cup of coffee at a time; Any coffee maker can be a single-serve coffee maker if you only use the water and coffee grounds you really need. No capsules required; maybe just a filter.

This article originally appeared in Grinding in https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/why-its-so-hard-to-create-a-truly-recyclable-keurig-coffee-pod/. Grist is an independent, nonprofit media organization dedicated to telling stories about climate solutions and a just future. Get more information at Grist.org.