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Some have a Keurig machine in them 40 million households in the US Single-serve coffee brewing systems – which allow consumers to brew just one cup of coffee at a time by inserting a pod into a slot and pressing a button – have exploded in popularity since the early 2000s.
This inevitably leads to a lot of waste.
With every cup of coffee brewed, a conundrum arises: what to do with the coffee pod that produced it. For starters, can it be recycled? In the case of Keurig, the answer is not really. The company’s single-serve coffee pods – also known as K-cups – are made from polypropylene, a material that Experts warn that it is not very recyclable as consumers have been led to think. Two of the country’s largest recycling companies have said they won’t accept K-cup pads, and one environmental group calculated that if you put all the K-cup pads in the world’s landfills side by side, they would comfortably circle the globe 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 from 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 Chief Innovation Officer at Keurig Green Mountain, as the company was previously known. “We believe this is the most exciting coffee innovation since the K-cup,” Hartley said during a press call on Cambio’s launch day.
However, experts are not sure Cambio understands how big of a problem K-cups pose to recycling systems.
“Really, 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 advantages, “will still experience problems.”
Part of the difficulty in creating a truly recyclable packaging option – for virtually any consumer good – is the severely fragmented nature of the U.S. recycling landscape. “There are more than 10,000 recycling systems in the U.S.,” says Pare, who is also a member of the Plastic Pollution Working Group at Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability. “And yet in the US, only a quarter of the population has access to recycling” (Pare lives in one such community without a formal recycling program, just outside Augusta, Maine.) In the US, the question of whether something is recyclable can only be determined by be answered accurately at local level.
Another problem is the plastic composition of most K-cup pods. Concerns about sustainability have followed the Keurig brand closely as it scales up. (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 goal Making 100 percent of K-cup pods ‘recyclable’ by 2020. But the company has gotten into trouble for touting recyclability. In 2018, resident of California Keurig sued for claiming that K-cup pods could be recycled after the foil lid was removed and the coffee grounds were rinsed or thrown away – resulting in Keurig agreeing to pay $10 million in a class action settlement. And in September of this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Keurig for 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 chose aluminum as an easier-to-recycle alternative. 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 how the roaster intended,” says Hartley.
Cambio is not the first coffee company to choose to abolish 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 pods would be made from it 80 percent recycled aluminumand it claims the global recycling rate is too 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 pull off the lid and dispose of the coffee grounds before recycling. Nespresso pod lids are difficult to removeand the company instructs users to recycle their pods as is, grounds and all, but they are only approved for curbside recycling in New York City And Jersey Citywhere a designated recycling company will dispose of them before reprocessing. (Nespresso consumers can also return used pods to the manufacturer for recycling, or drop them off at Nespresso stores.)
Unfortunately, replacing plastic with aluminum won’t automatically solve the recyclability crisis of K-cup pods, experts say. What really prevents coffee pods, whatever they are made of, from getting a second life is their size.
After collection, recyclable materials are sorted in a facility known as a material recovery facility or MRF. MRFs are not equipped to collect small objects; a general rule of thumb is that they can’t handle anything smaller than a credit card – which is why small items placed in recycling bins often end up in landfills. “The K-cups are so small that they fall through the machines in many recycling facilities,” says Pare. “So other than individually separating coffee pods from the waste stream, there is no good way to recycle them.”
Cambio’s approach to getting around this is twofold. First, the company says it wants consumers to stack used K-cup pods on top of each other — and then squeeze them shut — to meet the requirements of many recycling facilities. Three or more used K-cup pods should yield a piece of aluminum large enough to fit through recycling facilities’ machines, Hartley says. (These instructions do not currently appear on Cambio’s packaging or website.)
Cambio says it is also developing a device that will make stacking and squeezing used K-cups easier. “Think of this device as an easy way for consumers to bundle cups together and then throw them in the trash,” Hartley says. He added that the company has filed patents for second-generation Cambio pods, which can be snapped together after use.
Jan Dell, a chemical engineer and founder of a nonprofit environmental organization, said, “I don’t think aluminum pods are a meaningful improvement,” citing their small size as a barrier to acceptance and sorting through curbside recycling systems. “Think of the pods as confetti: impossible to retrieve.”
Cambio disagreed with Dell’s characterization of the move to aluminum, pointing out that essentially no single-use plastic pods are currently recycled, while aluminum can be recycled endlessly. “For Cambio and consumers, these two facts are meaningful.” Hartley also shared that work to ensure Cambio’s compatibility with recycling programs across the country is “ongoing.” The company plans to conduct trials of MRFs 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 said the company has “lightened our pods to reduce the amount of plastic used” and “increased their recycling options,” including a soon-to-launch program where customers can mail in their products. used pods to Keurig for recycling. The spokesperson also said the company is “continually” exploring more “sustainable packaging options.”
Dell leads the nonprofit organization The Last Beach Cleanup, which focuses on combating plastic pollution. The ultimate solution to Keurig’s plastic footprint, she said, is a product that “eliminates the need to take anything back from customers,” such as a fiber-based pod that can be composted along with the soil.
Keurig is currently testing a plant-based pod format that contains no plastic or aluminum, and the company expects it to be certified compostable, the Keurig Dr Pepper spokesperson said. Hartley said he worked on that product for many years and called it “a great innovation.”
But these coffee pucks, which are not yet for sale, a completely new machine will be required run. “It will be a long time before America throws away 40 to 50 million brewers and buys 40 to 50 million new brewers,” Hartley said. He added, referring to his time at Keurig: “I won’t publicly share how much money we spent to start from scratch and get 50 million American households to love their Keurigs. But it is a big lift and it will take decades.”
In an interview with the Atlantic in 2015 said the inventor of the K-cup said, “I sometimes feel bad that I ever did it.” As the market for single serve coffee makers is growing, and so is the impact on the environment unless the products are somehow wildly reimagined and redesigned. Keurigs and Nespresso machines are marketed as both convenient and luxurious, a combination that will likely continue to attract new market segments.
But environmentally conscious coffee brewers can rest easy knowing that you don’t need a Keurig or Nespresso machine to brew one cup of coffee at a time; Any coffee maker can be single-use if you only use the water and coffee grounds you actually need. No pods needed – maybe just a filter.