There’s a Keurig machine in some 40 million households in the U.S. 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 soared in popularity since the early 2000s.
Inevitably, this leads to a lot of trash. Every cup of java brewed creates a conundrum: what to do with the coffee pod that produced it. To start, 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 is not as recyclable as consumers have been led to think. Two of the country’s largest recycling companies have said they do not accept K-cup pods, and one environmental group calculated that if you lined up all the K-cup pods in the world’s landfills side by side, they would comfortably circle the globe 10 times. READ FULL ARTICLE