Your Keurig coffee capsules are never recycled

There is a Keurig machine in some 40 million households in the United States 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 been increasing in popularity since the early 2000s.

Inevitably, this leads to a lot of garbage.

Every cup of brewed java creates a conundrum: what to do with the coffee capsule that produced it. For starters, 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 that it is not so recyclable as consumers have been led to think. Two of the country’s largest recycling companies have said they won’t accept K-cup pods, and an environmental group has calculated that if you lined up all the K-cup pods in the world’s landfills side by side beside, he comfortably circled the globe 10 times.

A new coffee capsule company says it has developed a solution to Keurig’s plastic waste problem. Cambio Roasters, which launched in September, offers a Keurig-compatible coffee capsule that’s made 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,” Hartley said during a launch day press call for Cambio.

Experts, however, aren’t sure Cambio understands how much 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 the environment at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. But even aluminum, with all its benefits, “will always have problems.”

Part of the difficulty in creating a truly recyclable packaging option—for almost all consumer goods—is the severely fragmented nature of the American recycling landscape. “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. “Yet, at the same time, only a quarter of the population has access to recycling in the United States” (Pare lives in one of those communities without a formal recycling program, just outside of Augusta, Maine.) In the States United, the question. whether something is recyclable can only be accurately answered at the local level.

Another problem is the plastic composition of most K-cup pods. Sustainability issues have followed the Keurig brand closely as a ladder. (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 pods. made of polypropylene in 2016, with the aim of makes 100% of K-cup pods “recyclable”. from 2020. But the company has encountered problems to sell recyclability. In 2018, a California resident Keurig accused to claim that K-cup pods could be recycled after the foil lid was removed and the coffee grounds were washed or dumped – which resulted in Keurig. agreeing to pay $10 million in a class-action settlement. And in September of this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Keurig with falsely claiming the pods.”can be effectively recycled.” (Keurig settled the suit by agreeing to pay a $1.5 million penalty).

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 alternative to recycle. Aluminum is also impervious to oxygen, which causes coffee to lose its flavor over time. “Every time we make a cup of coffee, it tastes exactly as the roastmaster intended,” Hartley said.

Cambio is not the first single coffee company to opt to abandon plastic or invest in circularity. Nespresso, a famous single-serve coffee company that belongs to the Nestlé Group, has made its own aluminum capsules. for more than 30 years. In 2020, Nespresso announced that its pods will be made 80 percent recycled aluminumand states that its global recycling rate is 32 percent.

But Nespresso pods 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 brewer.”

Cambio also allows users to peel off the lid and discard the grounds before recycling. Nespresso capsules the lids are difficult to removeand the company instructs users to recycle their pods as they are, grounds 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. (Nespresso consumers can also send used pods 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 what they are made of, from having a second life is their size.

After collection, the recyclables are sorted into a facility known as a materials recovery facility, or MRF. MRFs are not equipped to collect small items – a common rule is that they cannot handle anything. smaller than a credit card – and so the small objects placed in the recycling bins often end up being sent to landfills. “The K-cups are so small that they fall through” the machine at many recycling facilities, Pare said. “Other than separating” coffee pods from the waste stream “individually, there is no good way to recycle.”

Cambio’s approach to working around this is twofold. First, the company says it wants consumers to stack used K-cup pods together — and then close them — 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 machine at the recycling facilities, Hartley says. (These instructions do not currently appear on Cambio’s packaging or website.)

Cambio says it has also developed a device that will make the stacking and pinching of used K-cups easier. “Think of this device as an easy way for consumers to bundle cups together and then throw them in their recycling bin,” Hartley said. He added that the company has filed patents for second-generation Cambio pods that can be “snapped” together after use.

Jan Dell, a chemical engineer and founder of an environmental nonprofit, said, “I don’t think aluminum pods are a significant improvement,” citing their small size as a barrier to being accepted and sorted because of curbside recycling systems. “Think of pods as confetti: impossible to collect again.”

Cambio does not agree with Dell’s characterization of the change to aluminum, indicating that currently, essentially, there is no recycling of single plastic pods, while aluminum can be recycled endlessly. “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 run tests with MRF in specific markets “as much 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 “lightened our pods to reduce the amount of plastic used,” as well as “increasing options for recycling,” including a soon-to-be-launched program where customers can mail in their products. . used pods at Keurig for recycling. The spokesperson also said the company is “continually exploring” more “sustainable packaging” options.

Dell runs the non-profit organization The Last Beach Cleanup, which is focused on fighting plastic pollution. The ultimate solution to Keurig’s plastic footprint, he said, is a product that eliminates “the need to collect anything from customers,” such as a fiber-based pod that can be composted with soil.

Keurig is currently testing a plant-based pod format that will have no plastic or aluminum, and the company expects it to be certified compostable, according to a Keurig Dr. Pepper spokesperson. Hartley said he has been working on that product for several years, calling it “an amazing innovation.”

But these coffee pucks, which are not yet available for sale, will require a completely new machine to run “It’s going to take a long time before America has to throw away 40 or 50 million beers and buy 40 or 50 million new beers,” 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 families who love their Keurigs. But it’s a big lift, and it takes decades.”

In an interview with the Atlantic in 2015, the inventor of the K-cup he said, “I feel bad sometimes that I ever did.” As the market for unique coffee breweries grows, so does its impact on the environment, unless its products are somehow wildly reimagined and redesigned. Keurigs and Nespresso machines are marketed as both convenient and luxurious, a combination that is likely to continue to draw in new market segments.

But eco-conscious coffee brewers can rest easy in the knowledge that you don’t need a Keurig or Nespresso machine to make one cup of coffee at a time; each coffee can be unique if you use only the water and coffee grounds you really need. No need for pods – maybe just a filter.

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