Do you know how wasteful coffee pods are? Well, Keurig does, and the company just made a big announcement: “100-percent of K-Cup®pods will be recyclable by 2020.” Only four more years of senseless waste!
Coffee pods are a bad idea. I’ve gone on this rant before, and I stand by every word I wrote way back when. This Keurig news just has me all sorts of steamed up, though. Keurig sold nearly 10 billion K-Cups in 2014. Laid end-to-end, those little blocks of trash would circle the globe 12 times. And while the company has rolled out some recycling programs (as has Keurig’s competitor Nespresso) the fact of the matter is that these lazy man machines produce a lot of trash. Just because something is recyclable does not mean people will recycle it, especially Americans.
Those good citizens who would recycle all of their spent K-Cups, however, will be able to do so—in four years. I contacted Keurig to ask what was taking so long and basically why some 40 billion more coffee pods would end up in landfills before the recycling program would be in place. I’ll update this post if I hear back.
In the meantime, let the great world spin, and the landfills overflow with the detritus of selfish coffee experiences. Forget how Keurig makes its sustainability efforts sound like a good thing. Coffee pods yield nothing but shitty brown stew that tastes like dirt, and mountains of trash that will take thousands of years to decompose.
Nobody said convenience came without consequences.
[Keurig]