Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Coffee Pods

Last month, K-Cup inventor John Sylan made headlines when he said what plenty of environmentally conscious folks were already thinking: He wished he’d never invented the nonrecyclable coffee pods. Although the manufacturer of K-Cups, Keurig Green Mountain, has the goal of making the tiny plastic containers sustainable by 2020, that might be too little, too late. Just the pods sold in 2014 can encircle the globe at least 10.5 times. That astronomical amount of waste will only grow over the next five years as the number of people who roll out of bed thinking about the convenience of single-serve coffee—not plastic piling up in landfills or floating in the ocean—increases.