“I don’t have one. They’re kind of expensive to use,” John Sylvan told me frankly, of Keurig K-Cups, the single-serve brewing pods that have fundamentally changed the coffee experience in recent years. “Plus it’s not like drip coffee is tough to make.” Which would seem like a pretty banal sentiment, were Sylvan not the inventor of the K-Cup.
Almost one in three American homes now has a pod-based coffee machine, even though Sylvan never imagined they would be used outside of offices. Last year K-Cups accounted for most of Keurig Green Mountain’s $4.7 billion in revenue—more than five times what the company made five years prior. So even though he gets treated like a minor celebrity when he tells people he founded Keurig, Sylvan has some regrets about selling his share of the company in 1997 for $50,000. But that’s not what really upsets him.
In 2010, journalist and caffeine aficionado Murray Carpenter visited the Keurig facilities in Waterbury, Vermont, reporting for The New York Times that the K-Cup idea posed environmental concerns, as the pods were neither recyclable nor biodegradable. That same year, the Keurig model seemed to take off, doubling in sales. In a 2011 local-boys-make-it-big story in the Boston Globe magazine, Eric Anderson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University, likewise noted that the coffee machines could invite significant backlash because they “generate a ton of plastic waste.”
At the time of Carpenter’s visit, Keurig was on pace to sell 3 million K-Cups. So to say that growth has been good since then is understatement; last year they topped 9 billion. But today the cups are still not recyclable or biodegradable. And they only stand to become rapidly more ubiquitous. Later this year, in partnership with Coca-Cola, the company will release a machine called “Keurig Cold” that will “introduce Coca-Cola’s global brand portfolio” to the machines, growing rapidly closer to the corporate mission: “A Keurig brewer on every counter and a beverage for every occasion.”
Though the predicted consumer backlash has arrived, especially in recent months, the company continues to grow. Others have entered the market very successfully. While drip-coffee-maker sales are stagnant, pod-machine sales have increased sixfold since 2008. Looking back on his invention, amid increasing public condemnation of K-Cups as a scourge on the planet, Sylvan told me, “I feel bad sometimes that I ever did it.”
As a 20-something Bostonian in 1992, John Sylvan didn’t have a particular passion for coffee. But he was drinking 30 to 40 cups a day. He had to drink that much because, intent on starting his own business, Sylvan had left his menial office job and become his own test subject for coffee—at times barely palatable—that he could produce via a homemade pod device.
Sylvan was certain there was a market for a better, more customizable, more liberating caffeine experience than the tepid office percolator, run by vendors with a corner on the market for delivering terrible coffee en masse. Once he had a design that worked, he looked up the word excellence in Dutch—because “everyone likes the Dutch”—and he and his college roommate Peter Dragone named their new company Keurig.
Sylvan knew the pods would sell. As he explains the appeal now, “It’s like a cigarette for coffee, a single-serve delivery mechanism for an addictive substance.” But he had no idea at the time how ubiquitous the product would become. And, like printer cartridges or razor blades, the Keurig business model was predicated on another type of dependence.
The machines are not too expensive as appliances go. You can get one for $63; a bargain for a taste of the good stuff. But once you have one, it has you too. The cups contain a mere 11 grams of ground coffee, vacuum-sealed in nitrogen to prevent oxidation. K-Cups are extremely profitable, selling standard coffee grounds for around $40 per pound. But what are you going to do, not buy the refills for your machine?
And when the pertinent K-Cup–design patents expired in 2012, and the market was suddenly flooded with off-brand competitors, the company created a second-generation (2.0) machine that would only function with Keurig-brand cups. It’s digital-rights management, the coffee equivalent of Steve Jobs’s attempt to fill iPods with music purchased only through iTunes. That might seem like a reasonable, defensible move to protect intellectual property and keep a corner on the market—except that some of the competitors’ cups are nearly completely biodegradable or reusable. Which does little to deflect the growing criticism that Keurig Green Mountain is not seriously prioritizing sustainability.
“Watch this. Oh my.” Sylvan sent me a link to a YouTube video entitled “Kill the K-Cup.” It was an apocalyptic two and a half minutes of K-Cups raining down on humanity like hellfire. Flying monsters and aircrafts made entirely of K-Cups shoot K-Cups down onto people cowering in the streets, which are filled with empty K-Cups. The video was highly produced, with Hollywood-level, Cloverfield-esque special effects and disdain for subtlety: K-Cups are quite literally destroying the planet. The implicit scale of the tragedy is enormous, even if we see only two people actually crushed by K-Cups.
The doomsday sequences are interspersed with statistics that drive the point home: In 2014, enough K-Cups were sold that if placed end-to-end, they would circle the globe 10.5 times. Almost all of them ended up in landfills. They are not recyclable. Using them is extremely wasteful and irresponsible; they are a stupid way to make coffee that simply cannot be sustained. Stop using them, stop using them, stop using them; “Kill the K-Cup before it kills our planet.”
Like many users of the Internet, I had actually already seen “Kill the K-Cup.” The mysteriously anonymous YouTube video was published this January, and spread widely. It spawned a hashtag #KillTheKCup (at the suggestion of the final frames of the video), which is still alive on multiple social-media platforms. Imitators have posted videos of themselves throwing their Keurig machines out of windows or bashing them with baseball bats, Office Space style. The “Kill the K-Cup” video was the most popular post on the environmental website Grist for multiple days. I asked the author of the post at the time if she knew the origin of the video; she didn’t. It was relatable enough that it got picked up on news sites even before journalists knew where it came from. It seemed like a strangely high-investment approach to video production, especially for something that no one bothered to take credit for.
Except, of course, someone eventually did.
Keurig Green Mountain is secretive about how many K-Cups the company actually puts into the world every year. The best estimates say the Keurig pods buried in 2014 would actually circle the Earth not 10.5 times but more than 12. The company would only tell me that last year they sold 9.8 billion Keurig-brewed portion packs—which include the new multiple-cup pods.
“Those are fully recyclable,” Monique Oxender is quick to point out. Oxender came to Keurig Green Mountain in 2012 to serve as its chief sustainability officer. Green Mountain, a company long known for eco-friendly approaches to coffee, acquired Keurig in 2006, even though the company did not change its name to “Keurig Green Mountain” until March of 2014. And indeed, every new K-Cup spinoff product that the company has introduced since 2006 (including the Vue, Bolt, and K-Carafe cups) is recyclable, if a person is willing to disassemble them into paper, plastic, and metal components.
“I gotta be honest with you,” Oxender said, “we’re not happy with where we are either. We have to get a solution, and we have to get it in place quickly.”
Last year, Keurig Green Mountain pledged to create a fully recyclable version of its blockbuster product, the K-Cup, by 2020. Last month the company’s annual sustainability report reaffirmed that vow. Oxender has reiterated the point multiple times during damage control in the wake of #KillTheKCup. But promising only five more years with this amount of waste has done little to satisfy detractors. Some say it won’t be possible, ever, to make a K-Cup that is anything short of an environmental shit storm.
“No matter what they say about recycling, those things will never be recyclable,” Sylvan said. “The plastic is a specialized plastic made of four different layers." The cups are made from plastic No. 7, a mix that is recyclable in only a handful of cities in Canada. That plastic protects the coffee inside like a nuclear bunker, and it holds up during the brewing process. A paper prototype failed to accomplish as much.
And because the K-Cup is made of that plastic integrated with a filter, grounds, and a plastic-foil top, there is no easy way to separate the components for recycling. A Venn diagram would likely show little overlap between people who pay for the ultra-convenience of K-Cups and people who care enough to painstakingly disassemble said cups after use.
Still, the Internet is littered with stories of personal realization that pod accumulation can’t be a good thing. “I wouldn’t describe myself as the most environmentally conscious person,” writes one user on the food blog Chow, “but as I emptied the K-Cup bin at work this afternoon, it occurred to me that this is quite the waste.” A commenter on another site describes the unsettling experience of regularly walking to work, in a financial district, past a dumpster full of coffee pods.
Even in Halifax, Nova Scotia, one of the few places that can recycle category No. 7 plastic, K-Cups are accumulating in quantities that alarm people who see the waste coming out of offices using the machines. At Egg Studios production company, for example, CEO Mike Hachey remembers the joy that enveloped his office when the Keurig machines first replaced their swill percolator: “Any cup of coffee we want! And look, they brew Starbucks!”
“Where we live, the recycling programs are quite good,” Hachey explained to non-Canadian me, “so you become accustomed to recycling everything.”
Hachey and his colleagues were embattled every time they finished making a cup. “We didn’t like having these little pods that we couldn’t just easily open up, compost the grounds, and recycle the plastic,” he explained. Even when the employees were willing to take the time to separate the lid, remove the paper filter, and compost the grounds, the local recycling facilities struggled with the cups falling through sorting grates.
“We work in advertising; we work with brands to help tell their stories, including social-media campaigns that require engaging content,” Hachey explained. “So we thought, you know what, we can take on a cause and really make something that would be passable.”
I laughed a little. Passable?
“You know, something that people would watch and want to pass on, like a viral video.”
(In the U.S., people tend to say shareable, but that’s also an awful buzzword cliché, so maybe passable should take its place? It works on another level, too, because so much shareable content is held only to the editorial and intellectual standard of being passable.)
It became clear to Hachey that in order for a video to be extremely passable, it needed to do something people would care about. Marrying that with satire and pop-culture seemed like a clear formula for success. Plus his company wanted an exercise in post-production. “What we ended up with was this short movie where we’re exaggerating the impact of K-Cups on the planet,” he explained. That movie was “Kill the K-Cups.”