It's been about a decade since plans for a recyclable K-Cup were introduced following the acquisition of Keurig by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, but now it looks like the equally popular and not-so-popular coffee pods are finally about to get the green upgrade we've been waiting for. Kind of.
According to a report in the The New York Times, Keurig is planning on doing away with its old, non-recyclable plastic pods and rolling out new single-serve K-Cups that are instead made with polypropylene, which is completely recyclable. (Whether the change will impact other K-Cup products, like Campbell's and Progresso soups is unclear.) The company estimates that after it introduces the recyclable K-Cups later this year, they will come to comprise of 50 percent of the total K-Cups by 2018, and 100 percent by 2020.
It seems promising, but the move may be too little too late for the company, which has already gotten a ton of heat over its environmentally irresponsible business model. For starters, people still aren't thrilled that the new pods are only recyclable, as opposed to being recyclable, compostable and reusable. There's also the fact that making K-Cups recyclable doesn't change the (very large) amount of resources that go into actually producing the pods.
"The production of each one of these coffee pods requires energy, materials, chemicals, water, transportation," Ms. Hoover of the Natural Resources Defense Council told the Times. "Recycling helps mitigate the effects of sending them to a landfill, but that does not offset the environmental effects of making them in the first place."
Finally, just creating recyclable K-Cups is hardly a guarantee that people are actually going to be recycling them. And because the popularity of single-serve coffee pods is all about convenience and efficiency, the chances of people taking the time to open up their pods and dispose of them responsibly seem pretty slim.
But even if recyclable K-Cups still aren't ideal, let's be real for a second: people are not about to break their single-serve pod habits (unless they're in Hamburg, where they have to). And since we're hooked, we can can at least benefit from taking a few steps in the right direction. As Monique Oxender, Keurig's chief sustainability officer, told the Times: "When you look at the trends toward single-serve generally, you can either villainize it, or you can fix it. We're trying to fix it."
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