The K-cup should get an award for worst invention of the last few decades. They turned making coffee from a process with easily compostable output into a massive trash production.
Business-wise they are genius though. Take something and make it ten times as expensive.
From the article: "According to a wildly popular ad campaign against the product earlier this year, there are so many discarded K-Cups that if you lined them up it would be enough to circle the earth more than 10 times — and that's just from one year's worth of coffee pods."
Yes. I think the incentives to have a sustainable/ethical design in the context of reducing waste or recycling waste would be a good incentive for products/service/companies like this. Could there be a subsidy for companies that take the time to manage their products/design/supply-chain to combat wastefulness/negative externalities of using the product/service?
For example, Apple appears to be taking the environmental impact of their business seriously:
Honestly the only effective potential remedy I see is to probably tax producers for their wasteful byproducts. Tax Keurig the corporation a dime for every one of those cups, and I don’t buy the things but figure a box comes in increments of a half dozen, so we’re talking between 60¢ to an additional $2.40 a box. Now theoretically the cup and the seal are separate components as far as a recycler is concerned, so maybe they should be charged separately for both the lid and the cup, but at least the coffee itself is compostable so there is no need to also charge for that, but you can go ahead and throw an additional dime on for the box itself and any other cardboard components that act as a spacer inside the box, and maybe a dime on for the tape. Charge a quarter for any non-recycleable components.
Then: nix the tax for any corporation willing to take back their own wasteful byproducts at their own cost and recycle them.
Extreme? Oh yes, but also a great way to align a corporations incentives, and anything else is most likely a half measure that makes the problem worse by preventing an effective measure from being put in place.
The turtle choking to a Keurig cup in the Pacific doesn't really care that the cup had an additional tax on it.
In general, we should stop making waste just for the sake of appearing more sophisticated. Keurig has very successfully targeted the same people who insist on bottled water, even though tap water is higher quality and cheaper.
I don't know what's wrong with the basic human wiring, but we really seem to have a glitch that makes us equate excessive consumption with higher socioeconomic class. See also: giant SUVs, etc, etc.
> You can't just appeal to people's better nature because humans are humans.
You must live in the alternate universe where everyone litters.
No, some people just don't litter. Whole cities where people don't litter! Sometimes, there is a clear protagonist and antagonist.
As an aside: an* effective means of keeping that cup out of the ocean is also to buy all the cups and not use them. Pretty much the exact OPPOSITE of a "pigouvian tax." Isn't that crazy?
What if we bought all the oil and didn't burn it? What if we buy all the land it's under? Or more realistically, what if I bought carbon credits in cap and trade and didn't use them?
Greg Mankiw has doomed a generation to inside-the-box policy with his inane textbook.
Bans can work and Pigouvian taxation can work. Horses for courses.
In Seattle we've banned the cheap plastic bags that blow around and get stuck in trees. There are many, many fewer tree-stuck-plastic-bag-ghosts to be seen around now. We've also put a mandatory 5c fee (not a tax, sadly) on paper bags; there are many, many more people bringing reusable bags to the supermarket.
(Ignores, of course, whether these reusable bags are better for the environment holistically -- having lots of yuppies buying synthetic shopping bags made in China and shipped to Amazon DCs, then having them individually shipped out in Prime boxes, etc. before being used is probably worse than just having pulp grown in America made into bags trucked en masse to the grocery and generally recycled or composted.)
Regarding carbon credits -- soon that will be not only feasible but tokenized and sub-divisible. See http://sparkchange.io/
It doesn't need to be globally prohibitive, it just needs to be sufficiently prohibitive as to curb majority use of the target. And usually the things that make the most use of the target is disproportionately affected by thin increases in cost.
eg if k-cups cost 2c to produce in plastic, and tax raises that cost to 5c, and margins were at 4c so now 1c, then it makes sense to start looking at alternative materials/strategies that weren't previously cost-effective.
At the same time, auto using a good deal of plastic per car, but much higher margins, and much less plastic use across the total market, might have their costs raised by $200 in total per car by the same tax; but if they had a $5k margin now dropped to $4.8k, they probably don't need to change much (they're still affected, but not nearly as bad).
The problem with plastic is that its cheap, so it can easily fit in disposable markets, but we really don't want it there, and disposable markets tend to have razor-thin margins. Ofc the strategy I just described might not actually affect K-cups: K-cups are really the only thing I can think of where plastic got added to make it a luxury product, rather than removed (cars otoh are luxury despite the plastic). And being a luxury product, it's probably got decent margins and can eat small tax increases.
But you can probably get 90% of the way there with minor taxes. And ofc you'll still have necessary usage for certain things (lets say, emergency shelters), but you can avoid adding loopholes to plastic by lowering less tax-burdens on other aspects of the target industry, which might be less viable/harmful to abuse.
Bottled water & k-cups are fundamentally about time & convenience.
Buy a pack of bottled water or disposable cups and you just avoided an entire workload of maintaining, tracking and washing a bunch of cups. Out and about and don't want to maintain your own personal water bottle, and don't want flavored water? You buy bottled water!
Same with k-cups. You don't have to maintain a grinder and bean bags, you don't have to wait for the drip coffee machine to finally finish, you don't need to boil water for crappy instant coffee with sediment, you don't have to clean any of these machines either. You just fill the machine with water and clean your mug and maybe descale the thing a couple of times a year.
That's what the tax is for, to disincentive making a product that results in waste. If the tax makes the cost to produce a wasteful product higher than one which is recycled, companies won't produce waste (as much).
It’s about the closest market based solution that is likely to work. But I’ll cop to the turtle not caring, even if the extra revenue might 1. Reduce the likelihood the turtle ever even sees the cup or 2. Help cleanup the cups that are out there.
Since the turtle doesn’t care about the tax anyway, I’m willing to go the extra mile and simply ban single use polymer products altogether, and we’ll go back to however we handled things prior to their introduction into the marketplace.
If there is a way to exploit a system for personal gain people will do it. You can be an optimist but don't take this statement as fatalist or excusing, the tax levied on these goods should match or exceed the damage society thinks they are causing. This allows people who want to do the right thing to not suffer financially for doing it.
> The turtle choking to a Keurig cup in the Pacific doesn't really care that the cup had an additional tax on it.
Right, and the sea life dying from warming and acidification of the oceans doesn't really care that the carbon emissions had an additional tax on it....
I always thought it would be good and fair to tax companies based on the cost to clean up their disposed products. Ideally as soon as something ends up in a landfill the company gets s bill. Make something reusable or recyclable? No tax. Make something designed to be thrown away? Your company ends up paying more. Implementation would be hard though.
Not disagreeing, but the administrative overhead for tracking the cleanup is a lot worse than tracking the production.
The reason by the way I’m suggesting a tax on production is because a product isn’t necessarily a sale: the physical waste still exists even if it just sits in a warehouse before being disposed of.
The difference is a company report backed up by regular inspections and then a bill versus the labor necessary to separate waste, track down the responsible producer, estimate the cost of their wasted products and send them the bill.
Find the number of pounds or kg of coffee that Keurig buys and sells each year. Divide that into Keurig's total revenues to find out what price to weight ratio (including the cost of the machines and coffee) their customers pay. As they sell to resellers, add another 50 percent or more for subsequent markups, and you will get an idea of what Keurig costs in comparison to just buying a can of coffee off your grocer's shelves and brewing it yourself (add a little for the cost of a new electric coffee pot each year to the non-Keurig cost, it costs around a month's Keurig's coffee for 1 or 2 persons). I have not been through this calculation for a few years, but the result I got suggests that coffee drinkers have been paying a large penalty for their preferences already, equivalent to a tax rate that would be very unlikely to survive if imposed by any non-totalitarian regime.
Tax on products sucks because it's a cheap bandaid. It is passed onto consumer with no incentive for corporations to make environmentally friendly products. In fact, theres two things that happens with a tax:
1) as the tax will be broad. What if I invented a biodegradable capsule that decomposes after 6 months? No company will buy this invention. Because it will still be taxed.
2) company can make their process even cheaper than the tax imposed. Ie contents of two capsules is now one big capsule. Or use cheaper unhealither material.
What you need is for companies to take back their own waste.
Then increase cost of disposing of waste with more funds towards environment agencies. It would be amazing to see landfill bins on streets to be a relic of the past.
Tax is not a "cheap bandaid", it's literally the most direct solution you could impose on a market economy.
> with no incentive for corporations to make environmentally friendly products.
Competition is the incentive. As is profitability. A tax on bad business practice makes good business practices a better option.
> 1) as the tax will be broad. What if I invented a biodegradable capsule that decomposes after 6 months? No company will buy this invention. Because it will still be taxed.
Tax as defined by GP will not cover your invention.
> 2) company can make their process even cheaper than the tax imposed. Ie contents of two capsules is now one big capsule. Or use cheaper unhealither material.
If they could do that easily, they'd already have made it so. It is possible that a company would have no other option than doubling down on the bad practice, but they'd still be paying full cost for negative externalities - money the society could use to mitigate them. But the more likely outcome is that a company will switch to a method that's suddenly more profitable because of being untaxed.
At the very least, the tax would give companies a reason to look for a better way.
I do agree that the tax is useful but it needs to go further.
Re: Gp point. How do you think the government can determine wasteful disposables?
There's cars that only last 5 years instead of 40+. (Apparently replacing metal with plastic cut costs but increases maintenance costs). Is a car lasting 5 years, a wasteful disposable? What if it's still functional but needs replacing with more plastic? At 10 cent a car, why would this discourage car companies from 1 year car use?
What i see is that the gov will need a big agency to determine which disposable is wasteful (non biodegradable/recycable?) vs those that are not. Either that or the agency approve exceptions which may not be cheap either?
My proposal means the costs of environmentally friendly products are reflected in the price instead of a tax. By making companies take back waste.
A car with plastic will cost a lot to dispose of, just like a lot of plastic products. Now imagine if all products were replaced with aluminium and glass. Less disposable costs.
Edit: in economic terms. The waste is an externalised cost by companies. My proposal privatises it.
Devil's Advocate I know, but would people recycle things if they could repair things themselves?
I mean, let's figure you have two possibilities:
1 You have to take it to Apple and have it replaced. In which case Apple will try to salvage (recycle) whatever they can.
2 You buy a new sub-component, take the old sub-component out, and salvage (recycle) the old sub-component yourself.
In all honesty, what is the percentage of people who would actually complete the salvage (recycle) step of option 2? I think it's, at least reasonable, to suspect that the percentage is not terribly high.
Apple practically invented the concept of "planned obsolescence". They are also the people who pioneered the idea of non-removable batteries in laptops and phones, and they are so antagonistic to people repairing their hardware that they invented extra pain-in-the-ass screws. Let's not hold them up as some sort of beacon of environmental stewardship, ok?
>Apple practically invented the concept of "planned obsolescence"
I don't think so. While they have indeed closed down self-repairs and upgrades, and stop supporting some models after 5-6 years:
a) Their products keep their resale value higher. That's the opposite of "planned obsolescence"
b) They update iPhones/iPads for as many iOS releases as they can, whereas Android phones have historically been (and still predominantly are) left off with no updates post-sale (statistics verify this)
c) Their stuff might not be user operable but can be upgraded at their stores and is also regularly refurbished (and it happens by the hundreds of millions too)
d) They also have recycling programs in place
That said, easier repair and upgrades would indeed be more environment friendly. Even better, less models, as opposed to a new model a year and having people chase it.
A heavy tax on buying gadgetry (proportional not to the value of the product, but to one's income) would help. But of course the whole economy is based on "more more more, externalities be damned".
I suspect the batteries and serviceability are a drop in the bucket when done directly by the consumer. Apple is very serious about making goods that last and that hold their value when refurbished.
No idea if they're serious about recyclability, but keeping an old thing is 100% better than getting a new thing while recycling the old one, environmentally speaking. And Apple's "innovations" make that difficult.
Apple is also serious about that; the policy under jobs was “we don’t ship junk” and AFAIK that continues today. I know plenty of people still rocking the iPhone 5s, their software support is ahead of other manufacturers I know off and they offer programs to replace worn batteries of all their models in stores, as well as trade in programs for almost all models.
I am not aware of any android manufacturers with such long resale value.
Fixed batteries are nothing new, anti-tampering screws are nothing new, and trying to prevent more support cases by limiting the things customers can break is also nothing new.
What is new is the polarization over technology brands and people using arguments on things they pretty much know nothing about and have no experience with.
What is new is the polarization over technology brands
I've survived the apple gigahertz gap, countless generations of console wars, seen usenet flamewars last for weeks, and any number of minor brand skirmishes & salvos. Polarization over tech brands is nothing new. "War never changes" [0]
Well, that is of course correct. I guess I was simply thinking with YouTube and non-technical people screaming on the internet in mind, which is obviously not what techno-polarisation embodies.
Disclaimer: ex apple engineer with apple stock still.
The perspective inside for the rank and file was dominated by concern about hackers and stolen iPhones for the touchid security. Apple was trying to get people to trust their medical records and finances to the device (a massive market opportunity) and so took an extremely paranoid approach to how replaceable the hardware was, to prevent trivial exploits. The repairability market was small peanuts compared to that, and I genuinely believe that no one wanted iPhones to be harder to service vs other phones.
I'd be more willing to accept the security justifications for bad repair-ability if it didn't extend across their entire portfolio and to their authorized service providers. Why do AOSPs have to replace entire mainboards (CPU, memory and all) instead of individual components on the iMac?
"The repairability market was small peanuts compared to that, and I genuinely believe that no one wanted iPhones to be harder to service vs other phones."
You've contradicted yourself a bit here. You said that Apple was willing to forgo repairability in order to chase a new market. So, while making the devices hard to repair wasn't the primary goal, it certainly was something they wanted to accomplish in order to service a goal that was more appealing to them -- so they did want the devices to be harder to service.
"is sounds a lot more like that non-Apple repairability getting harder is simply a side product."
Yes, that was what I understood. What I'm saying is that it's hard to assert that "no one wanted iPhones to be harder to service" when they've intentionally made the decision to make iPhones harder to service. Yes, making them harder to service was not the primary goal, but they chose to do it in order to achieve a different goal -- therefore they wanted iPhones to be harder to service.
I think you and the decision-makers were entirely sincere, but good intentions can still result in market failures.
As a side note it's baffling tome that a firm like Apple would go all in on touch ID given the numerous demonstrations in movies and TV of how that would likely be abused, many of which have made the jump from fiction to reality.
Can't agree with that. Being able to get into anything with a Philips screwdriver and then think through what I found inside was how I developed the hacker mentality way back in the 70s/80s, back when a pocket calculator had lots of discrete components and one chip.
Repairability alone won't solve an environmental crisis, and of course as technology advances integration makes many repairs impossible, so bad luck if your SD card gets damaged. But being able to open things up is still valuable. A year or two back I called out a synthesizer manufacturer who was misrepresenting the technical capabilities of their expensive but software-incomplete product. If I hadn't developed the experience and confidence to find my way around unfamiliar circuit boards and how to read component markings I wouldn't have been able to do that.
Anti-tampering screws have been around a long time. I remember somewhere in the 90's being surprised to see triangle screws and clockwise-only screws (not sure what their name is) in kids toys. Not all of them did it, but I distinctly remember Siku (a german manufacturer?) and Matchbox doing this.
In Apple's case; I don't think malice is why they do what they do, it's probably a byproduct of a much simpler reason. As posted above, security might be one. If a device is harder to take apart, it's also harder to tamper with. I personally think that this would only hold up to some degree as an attacker with enough resources could get in anyway, but perhaps the required resources are are a high enough level that common attacks are less feasible.
Another thing that is a way bigger issue (in my hacker mindset) is when SMT/SMD became common, just like VLSI. You suddenly can no longer easily see how a circuit works, and repairing a few failed components on a PCB gets much harder for most people. Then again, the cost (in time or paid time) is also no longer reasonably to have someone else do it. Replacing hardware and the benefits that can come with that are often a better deal than a repair.
Nintendo had security screws on their cartridges for the NES, so that goes back to the mid-1980s. I'm sure there were other products and devices that did the same (probably in the industrial and commercial arenas), but for the general US consumer, security screws basically made their appearance with the home video game console "revolution" (post-Atari 2600).
While the person you replied to emphasized how Apple supposedly pioneered those practices, I don't consider "not new" a good defense, even if factual (or a defense at all, really). And they are certainly worse than the competition in using those user-hostile anti-features.
Incandescent light bulb life is inversely proportional to efficiency. The current choice already costs many times the purchase price in electricity use, so if anything, they chose a value too long.
> The current choice already costs many times the purchase price in electricity use, so if anything, they chose a value too long.
But is it still "many times" when you factor in the costs of manufacturing it (all the way to marginal costs of mining the materials) and transporting it to the stores?
I really wish products were evaluated in terms of total costs; the shop price gives near zero information about the sustainability impact of a product.
> The Phoebus cartel created a notable landmark in the history of the global economy because it engaged in large-scale planned obsolescence to generate repeated sales and maximize profit.
> The cartel conveniently lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours (down from 2,500 hours) and raised prices without fear of competition. The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours.
Although they're not easily repairable, they remain usable so much longer than competition. Not sure if this source is accurate, but I've heard the statistic that 63% of iPhones ever made are still being used [1], which I'm pretty sure you can't say about Android phones.
Also, my personal experience with Apple stuff is that it lasts quite long; for example, I used my last Macbook Pro for around 6 years, and even then it was still working just fine, I just wanted TouchID when I upgraded it. On the other hand, my dad, on Asus/Lenovo/Dell machines, has replaced his laptop 3 times in the same period.
Not to mention all the other people talking about just how small a slice of consumers actually do properly salvage and repair their stuff. I'd assume a tiny, tiny percent of sophisticated consumers actually do, while the vast majority don't go to much lengths to repair or properly dispose of their electronics.
I like repairability for myself because I am capable of DIY fixing things. But I don't assume that companies that do it do so because they're somehow more environmentally conscious, when probably plenty of other practices they do are extremely environmentally destructive.
Their focus on slim and fashionable devices fits in with their whole product architecture. Fashions change, so Apple devices get replaced with newer ones often. So, why bother to make them last long? They shave every possible millimeter off the dimensions of phones and computers. This means that the devices have thin, easily cracked surfaces and more heat problems inside, leading to short lives. With the computers, they mitigate the customer outrage that would result from the heat-related breakdowns after a few years by getting the customers to anticipate the planned obsolescence. The warranty business is also a huge pot of gold for the company: with the marginal cost of a device so far below the average cost (which includes product development and promotion), the value of the warranty to many customers is so far above the cost of replacement products to Apple, any extension in the average product lifetime would drop the value of Apple by hundreds of billions.
> Could there be a subsidy for companies that take the time to manage their products/design/supply-chain to combat wastefulness/negative externalities of using the product/service?
Isn't that functionally what a "carbon tax" is? Seems like the obvious solution we (speaking from the U.S.) should have implemented decades ago. There are other types of waste, but plastic seems like the most problematic.
> there are so many discarded K-Cups that if you lined them up it would be enough to circle the earth more than 10 times
Or, that means you could put them into ten 76x76x76 foot cubes, with really inefficient cubic packing density, with one two-inch cube per K-cup. And that volume is mostly empty air, not plastic.
The problem is Apple is a unicorn in this regard. If you have a treasure chest of money collecting dust you can afford to be much more proactive. Most businesses are not afforded the luxury and will deliver what is the most cost effective which isn't always aligned with most environmentally sound.
Subsidies seem like the wrong approach, in that they require copious extra administration and are subject to abuse. Some economics theorists argue for securitizing externalities in some fashion, but I think the market for shipping recyclables to China is a good example of how this too can break down. I don't have a definite solution but I like the idea of disallowing deduction of all costs for tax purposes where they're a large increase in post-consumer waste, on the grounds that it's simpler to address the problem at source rather than in the large. I had to install some new light bulbs yesterday and I swear there's as much plastic in the containers they came in as in the ballast of the bulb itself.
>Apple appears to be taking the environmental impact of their business seriously:
The keyword is "appears" , having to replace half of a laptop because a key is broken is not environmental friendly even if you could 99% recycle the materials since you consumed ton of energy and created CO2 producing and then recycling those working parts.
The nearly-zero cost to throwing something away, while good for cleanliness of public spaces, seems to enable this. It has been unsettling to watch people close to me get upset, indignant, offended that a particular trash item would not just disappear. Entitlement.
The US in particular has developed a culture that says it's not only unacceptable to point out the negative externalities created by a business, but downright unpatriotic.
We definitely need to give Swiffer an honorable mention. Dust in your house? Why not clean it up and create an enormous pile of trash at the same time!!!
It's not clear to me that you're saving much of anything by using, for example, a washable duster versus a disposable duster. It takes a lot of water to wash things at your home. It doesn't take very much water to make a box of disposable dusters. Etc, etc.
K-cups are decidedly bad, because they waste plastics which are non-renewable. Dusters could be made, today, using only renewable resources.
They say an engineer is someone who can do for 10 cents what any fool can do for a dollar. I'd suggest that a salesperson is someone who can perform perform the same trick in reverse.
Is it the worst invention? Looking at the environmental concerns, it uses up landfill space but that isn't a huge concern. Worst invention would be Oxycotin since the number of lives it has destroyed. Or maybe the V6 or larger engines for the amount of pollution these engines have generated over smaller engines. Or microbead plastics.
Do people really not realize that there are reusable K-cup inserts that you can put your own coffee in, it's nearly just as fast and can be cleaned in the dishwasher? We've been doing this for years and basically use the Keurig to waste less water and energy when we need a single cup. I mean the insert isn't perfect as it's still plastic, but it's significantly less waste.
Less waste than an electric kettle? Only pour what you use. Once you factor in the hassle of loading and cleaning the reusable cup, I can't see what convenience advantage the Keurig brings over something like an Aeropress. It's just a less versatile machine that takes up more counter space than a kettle. Disposable cartridges are its raison d'etre.
Well, "environmentally conscious" is perhaps overstating it. Recycling and commercial composting (don't confuse that with the sorts of composting that gardeners do) is all well and good, but it just helps to mitigate the problem of garbage creation. The actually environmentally conscious thing to do is to minimize the amount of waste in the first place.
It's practical and the proof is that people are more than willing to pay the insane markup. How could it be the worst invention of the last few decades?
If the problem is waste, that's something for the government to sort out.
Obviously you're trolling here, but I expect more from adults that behaving exactly like spoiled children dropping litter everywhere because their parents or maybe their servants will clean up after them.
About this convenience thing, people are just getting lazier and lazier and then come up with rationalisations. Keeping a clean moka pot is painless, it also makes a cheap, really nice and eco-friendly coffee.
It's absurd to produce 10000% more thrash because you just don't want to wet your hands.
The best inventions are those where other people have to deal with the externalities? How do you propose the government handles this? Banning this kind of packaging?
A tax on disposable plastics is probably pretty doable.
The worst part is that K-Cups solve a non-existent problem. Their advantages over your normal office percolator is that it takes less work, nobody has to make it, they don't collect rancid coffee oils that nobody bothers to clean out, and the beans are marginally better than the garbage most offices are buying. You can also stock a variety of flavors without having to commit your entire office to drinking a pot of artificial cinnamon flavoring.
But you could solve all of those by just using instant coffee and a water boiler! Just about every other country in the world has figured out how to make decent enough instant coffee, especially in Asia. But for some reason, America is still stuck with Folgers crystals.
That's actually where I'd start if you want to have an impact via guerrilla marketing. Convince your office to switch over to something like Sudden coffee or even the Starbucks Via packs. No, it's not as good as your fancy third-wave coffee spot around the corner or even just a regular Starbucks. But it can be head and shoulders above anything a Keurig will give you.
It should be noted that John quit the company in 1997 and sold his idea for $50,000; so him speaking quite openly about his thoughts make sense.
Off topic:
I think we've tipped over to the other side of the "convenience/humanity" pyramid. We climbed to the top some years ago where the lack of excess convenience gave us the opportunity to make things our selves and interact with other people face to face (which I think are very important human qualities) while being comfortable. Now we are sliding down the convenience side of the pyramid, unable to grasp what is important and fundamental. We are literally snowballing (ie obesity epidemic).
Someone made a comment a few weeks ago from the Ansel Adams LA photos HN post, in regards to how thin people were back then, that really stuck out to me: there have been hundreds of small improvements that probably all add up together in terms of calories saved. e.g. power steering, escalators, elevators, transportation replacing walking or biking, etc.
Back to the coffee pods:
I don't get why people like to spend money on inferior experiences. My philosophy is if you're spending money on something you wont enjoy, you're wasting your money and your time. I'd rather spend more on something that provides some form of fulfillment. I cant blame those who don't have the opportunity to have something better.
It's absolutely 100% about speed for me. There is no faster way for me to get my coffee fix any way you cut it, and when I'm under major time pressure I appreciate it a great deal. With some of them the taste is a bit better than others, but there's really no getting around the fact that it's significantly worse than with other brewing methods (on top of being expensive and wasteful). Swiftness is the whole deal.
On a more leisurely day, I will break out the good beans, the grinder and the french press. But all that takes noticeably more time and energy, and when those are in short supply I tremendously value a lightning-quick alternative.
How often are you under major time pressure? If it's more than a handful of times a year I would focus on fixing that rather than patching over it with bullshit machines that produce inferior product and a mountain of pollution.
Whenever keurig comes up, a lot of people chime in with the “I don’t get why this is a thing”.
It’s not that complicated folks - folks don’t like things that are complicated. Anything that pops in or works at the push of a button is going to be selected for. As your examples with elevators and transportation - yes these allow less calories used, they also give us valuable minutes in our day. Do you not prefer to save time with convenience?
As far as keurigs not being of high quality - I guess the saying is “it’s better than Folgers”.
UK: I don't actually know anyone with one of these. I do know one chap who has a nespresso machine but he also has an aeropress. I just use my mokapot.
Having said all that, the nespresso sales stand in a local city centre shopping arcade seems to always have people there...
Surprised there's no mention of Nespresso's system, which uses aluminum pods that are recyclable. The 'pod per cup' system is very convenient, but I cringe at all the waste of the Keurig k-cups. Nespresso sold me though on their recycling program (fill a bag with the used pods and mail it to them for free).
I started with a 'real' espresso machine and bean grinder. The process for making a cappuccino in the morning was as follows:
1. Turn on the espresso boiler and allow it to warm up for 20-30 minutes.
2. Grind beans at the correct setting, then tamp them into the wand with just the right amount of pressure
3. Insert wand into machine, turn it on, and perfectly time the pour
4. Dispose of hot coffee grinds, rinse, brush and clean the wand.
5. Pour milk into frothing cup and steam for 60+ seconds or until optimal temperature is reached while ensuring that the steam properly turns the milk to achieve desired froth.
6. Combine milk and espresso in cup
7. Clean espresso shot cup, clean milk frothing cup, clean up errant coffee grounds, remember to turn off machines.
The process for making a cappuccino with the Nespresso machine:
1. Pour milk into frother, press button.
2. Insert pod, press button. It will finish within about 20 seconds, and a few seconds after that the milk will also be done.
3. Pour frothed milk into the cup that the espresso was dispensed into.
4. Rinse milk frother.
I had time for the full machine routine on a Saturday morning, but not before work.
I've got a Breville espresso maker (one of their "Barista Express" models) and the boilers warm up in about 20-30 seconds (i.e. by the time you grind and tamp, it's ready to go). It has an integrated grinder (which, once you find the right grind setting, never needs further adjusting), the pour time is programmed, it'll shut off the machine on its own after a bit of inactivity, and the rest of your steps take a couple seconds at most.
I think you're dramatically exaggerating the effort involved in DIYing it, and (done properly) you get a substantially tastier result from the real machine too.
seconded: Barista Express is fast and way better than Keurig. Compared to Nespresso, it's cheaper long run and you can use it for hot water (I'm going to try it as pour over b/c the convenient espresso is making me OD on caffeine).
This comes of pretty judge-y. Take a moment to consider all the waste you also produce each day.
Not to mention you're making the problem worse by making people defensive about their decisions, which just makes them go deeper and be unwilling to compromise. Try to solve the problem instead grand-standing.
I hope that no one identifies with those machines so much that they can't take valid criticism of what that thing leads to. Sure incorporating of objects into ones self image is common, but I do not think we can solve it by tip toeing around the issue. Yes you are affecting the climate and your local environment by all your actions, quite a lot and this particular thing is horrible.
There's a difference between acknowledging the problem and tackling it, versus cynically shaming the person. ("well if you get your cup in 30 seconds, I guess destroying the planet is fine") That just makes it into a personal attack, regardless of being a casual user or a Nespresso devotee.
You can say the same about driving a car to work. Or anything we do in our daily lives. As long as I can comment on hacker news, what's a little ecological damage (from wasting electricity supplied from some unknown source in an office room with florescent lights). Everything around me has caused some sort of ecological damage but I'll be damned if I have to go back to being a caveman.
Or maybe they were just comparing the current subject of cappuccino to the other expected kind of household coffee, rather than every single type of coffee out there.
You should definitely give a percolator a try. They sell em at ikea last time I checked, both single-cup and two-cup sizes. You put water in, You put coffee in, You stick it on the stove. When it starts making spluttering noises it's done and you pour it out. The only trash generated is the coffee used. Bonus points for grinding your own coffee fresh, my preferred method is one of those hand-crank grinders for mounting on the wall.
If someone prefers their coffee as an espresso with steamed milk, then Aeropress won't be the substitution they're looking for. I enjoy both, but one certainly doesn't scratch the itch for the other.
Convenience, obviously. Why own a car when you could ride a bike? Sure, it will take you 10x as long to get anywhere, but you can always just leave earlier.
This comparison makes no sense. Regular coffee makers make far less waste and are just as convenient. Hell, I grid my coffee by hand and brew it one cup at a time with one of those conic filters and it still takes only 6-7 minutes.
For a nontrivial number of people, that's probably about five minutes too many. Are you also factoring in the cleanup of your coffee-making accoutrements? That's a few minutes, too. Some people just want their cuppa, with absolutely minimal fuss.
Your metric for what is or isn't convenient isn't necessarily anybody else's, and other people aren't "wrong" for having different metrics than yours. Optimizing for time spent in the process of making the thing is a perfectly cromulent priority.
Cleanup? A regular coffee machine uses disposable filters. The advantage of the k-cup over this is brewing for a single cup of variable size. However this is easily achievable with pourover or "clever dripper" methods, each of which use the filter and thus have little to no cleanup. There's no justification for the cup system at all.
Take that up with the millions of people buying them. I do my own pour-overs in the morning.
I just find it endlessly fascinating to watch people extrapolate from their personal preferences, in the face of a demonstrably valuable (in the "it has value to someone" sense — because people are buying the things, which, in a capitalist system is definitive of "having value") to "There's no justification ... at all".
> Take that up with the millions of people buying them. I do my own pour-overs in the morning.
They don't even know the alternatives exist. Marketing is king.
You're misinterpreting the point. It's not quibbling over whether the customer values the product, that's self-evident. It's "not justifiable" in the ethical sense in light of environmental impact and the alternatives available. People just don't know.
I highly doubt that is the reason. I bet I would be hard pressed to find someone who owns a Keurig that is not familiar with standard "drip" coffee machines.
People opt for Keurig because it's quick and user friendly. Pop in a pod, hit a button, and then continue your morning routine. The entire user experience takes all of 10 seconds which has tangible value. I agree with your ethics argument, but I still don't believe that people are just buying Keurigs because they are blinded by marketing.
People just don't know there's another way to make coffee than pod machines? I'm sorry, I just don't accept that premise. What am I missing?
People are making a choice — an admittedly consequential one, yes — but they're making it based on their personal priorities, not because marketing has deluded them into thinking there's no other way. They're paying someone else to have done all the work of making their cup of coffee, except loading the pod, pushing the button, and making sure the water tank is full enough — for them, at least.
Hell, even that illustrates the point: in every environment I've ever been with a shared pod coffee machine, I've had to fill the basin, more often than not. People can't even be arsed to make sure there's enough water in the stupid thing for the next person who wants a cuppa. It's laziness.
> People just don't know there's another way to make coffee than pod machines? I'm sorry, I just don't accept that premise. What am I missing?
Other than drip, that's what I'm saying. They aren't aware of convenient alternatives. Stands to reason if they did, they'd buy them.
> they're making it based on their personal priorities, not because marketing has deluded them into thinking there's no other way
I don't think you can divorce marketing impact from consumer choices. Keurig as a priority wouldn't have existed without the advertising effort a priori.
I think the coffee pod idea took off because people use them at work (it's a pretty good setup for offices), liked the convenience, and end up buying a machine for home.
I have an E61 based espresso machine at home with a flat burr grinder and if it either part were to break today, I'd probably replace it with a Nespresso machine.
How is it fashion or wealth signaling if you're doing it at home, alone?
I'm sure it is for some people, but status signaling is baked into our monkey brains at such a deep level, I find it a bit silly to be something we throw shade at people for doing. But even if Joe the status-signaling pod coffee drinker is status signaling, he probably also appreciate the extra five minutes in the morning, or whatever.
Also, I've never tasted an instant coffee that didn't disappoint, usually profoundly. The pods are actual, real-time brewed coffee, with the same level of convenience.
We had a commercial Gaggia bean-to-cup machine, fresh ground, etc., the difference to me is noticeable obvs, but it's not worth the costs. It's only a drink.
>are just as convenient. Hell, I grid my coffee by hand and brew it one cup at a time with one of those conic filters and it still takes only 6-7 minutes.
It takes about two seconds to pop in a k-cup, maybe 20 more every N cups to fill up water. Also allows for different grounds to be used on a per cup basis.
Convenience and speed is the entire reason these things exist.
The single-cup brew is what sold it I think. Coffee machines were already just as fast and familiar, with fast cleanup, but programmatically brew a whole pot. You could achieve the same single cup convenience with a filter using pour-over or clever-dripper.
I drink about 10 cups of coffee per day (enjoy the taste). You are suggesting I spend over an hour, 7 hours per week (a full workday) making my coffee? That's literally insane.
Now, I'd never get one of these machines, because it tastes like ass - I tried it at work. People at the office walk up, pick from 20 different flavors, and make their cup. What is it you suggest to replace that? 20 huge office pots that someone refills from a huge drip machine, so some are out and some get underused and tossed/refilled in a few hours?
Your comparison is what does not make sense. You are taking your use case, which does not apply to 90% of the self-brew cases. Literally the definition of a strawman. I personally think cars are a bad invention, and I don't see the use. I live across the street from work, and once a week take a lyft. Why are all these people driving?? I just can't figure it out.
Now, here's what I do actually do. I have Kona green cherry and Peaberry light roast. I take a cup of green and grind it fine in my conical grinder. I double-filter tap water, boil it, then filter it again the next day once cool. I use that to boil the green for about 10min in a large steel pot. I drink half of that mixed with fairlife fat free milk. Good for 1st drink of the morning. While that's going on, I grind 2 cups of peaberry, and dump it into the pot, adding a lot more boiling water. Boil for 2 minutes, let sit for 10. Now it's mixed light roast peaberry and green, for that lightly charred lawnmowerbag taste. It's naturally quite sweet, but sometimes I'll add a splenda.
I spend more than an hour per day on coffee. The process is relaxing. When I'm at work running from one meeting to the next, I pop in a cup with some weird flavor and go on my way. If I had to do what you do, I wouldn't do it at all. That's the price of your 6-7 minutes - a barrier to entry that's just too damn high.
Actually it is a great example when you think of how much waste and pollution you create by driving a car instead of walking or riding a bike. Great example.
People like to virtue-signal but when they really want something all convictions go out the window.
I have the opposite during warm weather. I have a 12-15 minute bike commute that takes 45 minutes by car and an hour by bus. I'm sure that's not the case if you don't have decent bike infrastructure though.
Yes but that is an issue with your choices, which makes sense we all want convenience, but you could make those choices from a bicycle perspective. I did, atm I get about 10 minutes extra every day because actualy do something with my commute. This is true for every place I've lived in (Europe, NA/SA and Asia), you just have to make the choice.
And I out-walked (well, tied) the Uber driver who cut me off at a crosswalk, to dropping off his fare across the street from my apartment a few blocks further up the hill, the other night. Contextually constrained anecdata like ours simply aren't relevant to the general point here.
For the vast majority of people in the parts of the world where using pod coffee machines is a meaningful thing to talk about, your commute is a driving or transit kind of thing, not walking or biking.
While Nespresso machines make better coffee than Keurig it's still nowhere near the quality of an espresso made with good, fresh ground beans in a decent machine. I tried a few different Nespresso pod types and none were very good.
Not only does Nestlé put above average coffee in those capsules – the aluminum encasing ensures that the aroma doesn't evaporate. It's not espresso, but it is by far the best taste at an reasonable price.
And don't forget the space a serious espresso machine usually takes up (10k €). Grinder not included.
For an office kitchen, pod systems have better coffee than instant coffee; a lower upfront cost than a bean-to-cup machine; lower upfront and ongoing costs than a full-time barista; and less mess than an employee-operated ground coffee espresso machine.
A superautomatic like a Jura Capresso is a happy middle ground for a smallish office. They generally make decent coffee and espresso, and many have a milk frother as well. Larger up front investment, but less waste, coffee is generally cheaper than the pods, machine can be serviced as opposed to replaced, etc.
In my office, we make a large thermos (maybe it's a gallon or a bit more) of drip. It tastes great I think. Strong, black coffee. I guess those cups make flavored coffee. So if you like something other than straight coffee they're good. But I can't imagine why you'd ruin a perfectly good coffee like that :)
The way you emphasize the word require seems a touch condescending, when the answer is pretty obvious - convenience. Is there something wrong with recycling?
Now that I’m thinking I don’t actually understand what your hang up is. You’re asking why if recycling is important, didn’t OP use something that didn’t require recycling. He values recycling and being green so he selected a proprietor that reflected that.
If there's one thing I've learned about our own human nature, it's that we'll sacrifice anything in the future for even the slightest increase in convenience in the present. It's bonkers. The convenience these machines affords us is not large. It's tiny. If we could shave one second off the process by encasing the whole thing in yet another plastic single-use envelope, we'd do it instantly. If we could avoid having to re-fill the tank by purchasing pre-filled plastic tanks and tossing them in the garbage each time, we'd do it in a heartbeat.
And our food squeamishness also exists on a sliding scale: we will always accumulate more and more layers of plastic around our food, even though it's already packaged in a way that's totally safe and durable and sanitary. Remember when cereal just came in the cardboard box? This process is cumulative and will never end. We will never say no to another layer of plastic around our products at some point in the journey from factory to consumption.
I'd like to know exactly how recyclable those Nestle pods are. I suppose they refill and reuse them? What about if you toss them into a standard recycling system instead of mailing them to Nestle, which will never be a commitment that a significant number of consumers make. Sorry, it's just not going to happen at scale and they know it. The program is likely just PR. I doubt they are recyclable in a single-stream system because they're full of coffee grounds / whatever else.
It's astounding how much of the stuff we think we're sending to be recycled is just rejected and tossed anyway. It's an enormous percentage.
I fully admit to owning a Keurig and buying way too many cups for it. In the good days of the is product you could use Amazon subscribe and save to get pods for down as low as twenty cents each. Even Costco got in on it.
However prices are over thirty cents each. Now on my watch I get 4 cups from 1oz(28g) of coffee brewed with the Bonavita I can buy some really expensive coffee before I get back to the price of k-cups. filters are trivial cost and free if you use a washable. even making one cup isn't bad but I find the brew to be better with three or four cups. Work involved is really hardly any extra effort, at least not to be noticeable
Fortunately for me they pretty much removed me as a customer when the v2 came out which scanned lids to validate it was approved to brew. My original unit had been acting up but when confronted with a box or two of coffee and reusable pods being not valid I just skipped out.
Why not just use a single reusable cup that you fill with coffee grounds? I swear I’ve seen them before.
Second, that sounds like a heinously inefficient recycling program that relies on the goodwill of consumers... an extremely weak attempt at addressing the problem.
I was also going to mention Nespresso's pods. As far as I can see, they're just some vacuum packed grounds between two foil membranes. The amount contained seems a bit smaller than what's in an Aeropress scoop, but because of the square/cube law, the amount in an Aeropress scoop wouldn't be that much larger.
What about an automated version of Aeropress that forced the same amount of hot water and hot air/steam through a Nespresso-like pod? It could have adjustable temperature and press times, and should make coffee indistinguishable from an Aeropress. This would eliminate the one disadvantage of the Aeropress: it's quite easy but not quite as convenient as putting in a pod and pressing a button.
You mean for Keurig like machines? Whatever happens with Keurig pods, there's a big difference in something that results in far inferior coffee. I've never played around with grinding my own and putting it in a refillable K-Cup pod, however.
My experience in Tuscany in the mid 2000's, was that random corner store espresso wasn't bad or was pretty good and rarely had any bitterness. So if the pods are filled and sealed correctly, there should be a way of getting a result far superior to what Keurig machines typically yield.
Can confirm that a random corner store in Tuscany still yeilds good espresso, and I am still surprised by it. But that must be because Italians demand good espresso and everyone in Italy knows what good espresso tastes like.
Considering all the money and fuss that well heeled San Franciscans and SV people throw at coffee, the relative difference between them and ordinary people in Tuscany is pretty eyebrow raising.
If one is really a smart and self-aware person, it pays to be aware of how clueless one can still be, especially if it has to do with cultural or sub-cultural knowledge. It's the ability to see beyond groupthink which is the actual "reality distortion field." It's actually the ability to see past the existing reality distortion fields, which is the key.
Just how subject to groupthink are Bay Area folks? They are so subject to groupthink, they will spend lots of time and money for inferior product, in ignorance of cheaper, superior existing solutions.
nespresso tastes better than keurig but it still has an artificial taste that turns me off. thus i buy espresso drinks at the local cafes but make coffee at home in a clever dripper using freshly ground beans (in a burr grinder) and a dedicated electric kettle.
it takes a 5-7 minutes total but i've developed a routine where i do other things (feed pets, make breakfast, etc) during the wait times so the marginal cost is really only an extra minute or two. cleanup is just rinsing out the dripper (and washed once a week). even this drip coffee tastes better to me than nespresso and only takes a few extra seconds.
Surprised there's no mention of Nespresso's system, which uses aluminum pods that are recyclable
Last Christmas I was on the fence about whether to get a Nespresso or a Keurig. I ended up with the Keurig because it came in a color that matched the other appliances on my counter, while Nespresso only came in black, or somewhat-less-black.
If I'd known about the recyclable aluminum pods, I would have gone with Nespresso in spite of the limited color options.
Those Nespresso bags unfortunately didn't work for me because during the summer I always find worms there.
This is probably a bad idea to mail bags with living worms.
I love my Nespresso. Even the hardware is thoughtful and durable - same machine for the last 4-5 years.
Something I was surprised to learn is that many high-end (read: Michelin recommended or higher) use Nespresso. The reason? Absolute consistency. When they need espresso for a dish, or dessert, or even to serve (espresso/cappuccino) they know that it's the same result, every time. [1]
Although I like to point out, that when drinking Espresso out of home I'm with what the layman's bible of modern haute cuisine (modernist cuisine) promotes: that it's exactly the variance of Espressos "out in the wild" that can give you superb once in a lifetime taste experiences.
Physical waste is not a real issue. A landfill 10 miles square and 250 ft deep could hold all of the US's waste for the next hundred years. Twenty of these (Which could fit without people taking notice in any rural area) can hold the whole world's garbage for next 100 years.
> Physical waste is not a real issue. A landfill 10 miles square and 250 ft deep could hold all of the US's waste for the next hundred years. Twenty of these (Which could fit without people taking notice in any rural area) can hold the whole world's garbage for next 100 years.
Physical waste isn't an issue. But the high-nitrogen of coffee grounds makes it a shame to throw it away. Generally speaking, carbon-based compost material is easy to find (sticks, paper, etc. etc.). Good sources of nitrogen however is more difficult.
Its kind of a shame to throw away coffee grounds, because of how good they are for compost. Its like Aluminum: we have so much Aluminum it isn't really a big deal to put it into landfills. However, Aluminum recycles very easily, so its just a shame to throw it away.
If physical waste is not a real issue, why do I see garbage on the ground? Why is there tons of plastic in our oceans? I think there's more to the issue of physical waste than whether or not we can dig a hole big enough for it all.
"We totally have the space to bury this plastic in the ground. Killing wildlife and destroying habitats is a whole other issue. The carbon and ecological cost of producing massive amounts of single-use petrochemical products is a whole other issue. Chemicals leaking into the water supply is a whole other issue. Microplastics found in humans, animals and processed foods is a whole other issue."
We're not concerned about whether we can bury it in the ground.
> The carbon and ecological cost of producing massive amounts of single-use petrochemical products is a whole other issue.
You should take a calm look into the carbon and ecological cost of producing and reusing the reusable equivalents of those single-use products.
Besides... If you have any idea on how to make it possible that people not dig every gram of fossil fuels available and use it for something (that something being a piece of plastic buried somewhere being way better than carbon dioxide at the atmosphere), please say so, because natural gas based plastics aren't a world-ending problem, but the coal mining endgame is.
It will be a whole other issue only once we can make waste disposal 100% effective (if we can even expect that to happen). Until then waste is not a trivial problem.
I assume the reason this doesn’t happen is that the land value in first-world countries is too high (i.e. everywhere you’d want to put the landfill, someone wants to do something else with it and is willing to pay more than the landfill is worth to the municipality/state/country that wants to put it there.) And putting the landfill in developing countries (or rather, formalizing the landfill, since we already informally do that) wouldn’t change much, since we would still need a system of trash barges and so forth to get it there.
Also, presumably, we expect these developing countries to, well, develop, at which point their land values will also become high. Eventually, there will be no piece of land on earth with low-enough “rent” for us to just stick trash on. We’ll have globally gentrified the landfill into homelessness.
This does happen now. Very few countries have a shortage of landfill space now so there's no pressure to build even bigger ones that would fit everything.
Litter is a separate issue but kpods are not a type of waste that typically gets littered (unlike soda cans, etc.)
This presumes that the issue with waste is space, which appears to be a strawman argument.
The issues are idiotic resource usage and lack of proper waste processing techniques because rational resource usage doesn’t turn profits in the short term.
My calculations are larger by a factor of 2.5 (you've probably used density of water but I think that's a bit optimistic, don't know much about garbage compaction).
I mostly agree it's not as bad as it seems; however that doesn't account for the <100% disposal effectiveness (a certain % will realistically always make it to streets, rivers, oceans), or as others mentioned some chance of environmental leakage of landfills (an associated issue is energy efficiency and energetic cost of packaging and disposal) -- i.e. I wouldn't dismiss waste in total as an absolute non-issue.
but when you say "all the discarded k-cups could wrap around the earth 10 times" it sounds like that takes up a lot more space because people can't possibly visualize the size difference between a k-cup and the equator
it's like wrapping dental floss around a skyscraper the size of a slightly smaller earth
Thanks for bringing this point up and calmly repeating it to people. It's hard to overcome the "garbage is gross, therefore it must be a moral evil" kneejerk reaction which you see in so many people.
How do you propose getting all the trash to this one spot in America in a cost efficient manner? The logistical cost (and environmental cost) of shipping all our trash to one area would be a nightmare. Also how exactly are you planning on preventing the trash from having an environmental impact ? Physical trash can result in harmful chemicals leeching into the groundwater and affecting way more than 10 miles of area. This comment seems to be severely underestimating the cost of physical waste.
Human population is going to stablize in the next 100 years. Just build another. And modern built landfills don't affect the local environment or water table.
Why is this so much of an issue? I agree that is it a more wasteful way to do coffee than other machines, but not significantly so. Why is everyone so up-in-arms about this vs any other single serve item, like water bottles, soda, and tea/coffee cans? The shipping costs alone for moving what amounts to mostly water and all the packaging make pods look innocent or better.
Oh, people are up in arms about other single-serve items as well. Bottled water and excessive plastic packaging are two most ridiculous examples of what our economy has created.
Keurig cups are special though, being the archetype of a business completely fucking people over on multiple layers. Beyond all the plastic waste, there's also aspect of vendor lock-in and (recently) DRMing the coffee making process.
It's a little more nuanced compared to water bottles. Coffee powder needs to be kept in a sealed container to be 'fresh' (apart from expiry). So if you don't drink coffee often, pads could be a more sensible choice.
> Coffee powder needs to be kept in a sealed container to be 'fresh'
There's no shortage of those sealed containers. If someone has a Keurig machine, and is using those pods, then they also have a refrigerator and are able to obtain containers, which are inexpensive.
There is no real argument for keurig cups other than convenience.
Is that convenience worth all of the waste? Should people be able to choose to generate such waste for something so trivial? Should be firms be allowed to sell waste-generators like Keurig? If Keurig is not responsible for the mountains of damage done, and the consumers are not responsible, then where does the buck stop?
This area is ripe for regulation and well overdue.
>There is no real argument for keurig cups other than convenience.
This is true at anything that one purchases - you outsource the effort for a fee. All single serve items are the same or worse as the keurig in terms of waste that makes things easy.
> Should people be able to choose to generate such waste for something so trivial?
Yes.
>If Keurig is not responsible for the mountains of damage done, and the consumers are not responsible, then where does the buck stop?
Customers vote with their dollars. They are not to blame for the waste - but not free of responsibility. Want to make change? Stand up for what you believe and get others to join you. Don't make anyone do anything by force (regulation).
all those things are easy to replace too - just fill a water bottle from a filtered source and get a soda CO2 injection machine + syrup. coffee is about the same amount of work and needed equipment to make.
Yes significantly so. Compare buying bulk coffee and brewing a large carafe like Sylvan says, to K-Cups. First it's more expensive for you. Second you have unrecyclable plastic waste. Third what could once be composted now gets thrown into anaerobic landfill.
And people are up in arms about water bottles. This is just another ridiculous capitalist scheme that trades marginal convenience against our planet's future. It's no a significant source of pollution by itself but ingrains a culture of disposability that has created most of the pollution on earth.
>First it's more expensive for you. Second you have unrecyclable plastic waste. Third what could once be composted now gets thrown into anaerobic landfill.
1 - not if I take time/effort into account, or having someone prepare it for me
2 - How much less efficient is this than a coffee can/bag and filters?
3 - how much coffee is really composted anyway? how much of that is used productively?
Yes! I dump the grounds in a clean filter before bed. In the morning my machine turns on and heats up, when I’m ready I hit the button. It brews and I toss the now dirty filter into a tupperwear beside the machine. A few days later when I’m out of filters I dump the now dry grounds into the trash and rinse the filters with a drop of soap and the pressure hose on my sink. Almost as easy as the store bought pods but it’s better quality coffee and I don’t need to feel bad about the waste. It’s less expensive too by a significant margin too
The non-dispoable cups are the only reason I went with a Keurig. I wanted to have the option of using the k-cups and the option of using my own coffee.
So far, I haven't found any issues with using it. They look the same as your second link. It is some off-brand one.
I used to use these, but they're no longer available in my region. They were on heavy discount for a few days everywhere so I scooped them up, assuming they were being discontinued.
The k-cup is genius. There are 5 people over your house. They can all make a cup of coffee whenever they want. They want more? Just make another cup. They can do it themselves!
This is why I also have an automatic orange juicer, a soda fountain, and whole vending machine at my house--God I hate getting beverages for my guests.
I get the joke, but I legitimately think home soda fountains are a great idea. Shipping Cans/Bottles around is wasteful (in weight and in packaging). If commercial ones weren't thousands of dollars, but just a couple hundred, I'd probably buy one.
Something like a Sodastream, but by a different company with real soda in it, would be great.
I used to have a Keurig but instead had a refillable filter - instead of pods I just filled the filter with whatever coffee I wanted. Still super convenient, easy for just one cup of coffee, no waste.
I've used a plastic one for probably 2 or 3 years now. Came in a pack of two for about $20. Keurig even makes their own now, so it would likely work quite well.
Espresso is IMHO not so convenient to make. You need to prepare every portion separately, filling the filter holder correctly each time etc. This is why I personally switched from a traditional espresso machine to capsules. I still make basic filtered coffee with a normal coffee maker though.
I have a Gaggia Brera Super Automatic which has a bean hopper and grinds the beans fresh for each shot. All you have to do is turn it on and press a button. Every few days you just add more beans, refill the water reservoir and dump out the grounds collection unit. I paid $400 for it 3 years ago and the only maintenance it requires is running decalcifier through it every few months. If you're a regular coffee drinker, I'd say it's a worthwhile investment.
I guess Keurig is different from the espresso capsule machines. My machine is a locally licensed K-Fee compatible device and there are both brewed coffee and espresso capsules available. The brewed coffee capsules have some kind of mechanism that prevents the usual espresso crema from forming (I suppose by depressurising the water flow).
This reads like a snl skit, where they keep repeating "they did it themselves". Next scene, alien archeologists: "huh, each human in the house apparently caused this 10000-year-before-degrading-polymer to be produced for deadpans and looks at the camera a beverage!" Another team: "Ooooooh we found a lot of those in giant sea creatures carcasses!" Together: "They did it themselves!"
I used to make coffee with Aeropress every time, but finally got a cheap espresso machine (Breville Cafe Roma) and a coffee bean grinder (De'Longhi Dedica). Got a deal on both.
OK, so it's a bit more work than just slapping in a [pod] and pressing a button, but it's totally worth it and the only "waste" is the bit of coffee grinds. No plastic, no metal. Probably the total cost of ownership over the ~6mo since I bought the espresso machine is likely actually less than if I had bought a Keurig or Nespresso machine and been paying for the pods this whole time. Plus you can't really beat legit espresso and steamed milk. :)
That said, the Aeropress is always on hand for visiting elsewhere, road trips etc. Definitely the best alternative to a full-on espresso machine IMO.
I use an Aeropress daily and have a Moka. The biggest downsides to the Moka are time to heat up (on my gas stove), and pretty much needing to wait for it to cool down before cleaning it.
It might be a little faster with an electric stove, but the cleaning would still be a big hassle. I prefer to clean up my coffee making stuff in the morning after making coffee, before heading out the door for work.
K-cups are recyclable, it's just that no one does it because it's a pain in the ass to do at scale. You have to awkwardly peel back the top foil, dump the grounds, and then recycle the cup. Who at the office wants to sit there and do that for 20 cups in a row whenever the cup catcher fills up?
What we need is some sort of cup recycler hardware that takes the work out of the annoying part. Put the used cup upside down, and a device scrapes the lid off and vaccuums the grounds into a compost holder, then you chuck the plastic into the recycle bin. That would instantly resolve the k-cup waste situation at my office.
> K-cups are recyclable, it's just that no one does it because it's a pain in the ass to do at scale. You have to awkwardly peel back the top foil, dump the grounds, and then recycle the cup. Who at the office wants to sit there and do that for 20 cups in a row whenever the cup catcher fills up?
I do believe this is a myth.
K-Cups plastic falls into plastic-resin code #7: "Other plastic". Which means its the hardest kind of plastic to recycle.
IIRC, #1 Plastic (PETE) is easiest to recycle, but sucks at high temperatures. #5 Plastic (PP aka Polypropylene) is also easy to recycle, but I'm not sure if it'd stand boiling-point of water.
Most recycling plants IIRC will throw away Resin code #6 or #7, due to their difficulty to recycle. Some plants can recycle #6 or #7, but its not something you can count on.
Depends on the plant. I'm no recycling expert, but you have to remember that recycling plants are a combination of computer and human labor.
Computers handle a lot of stuff easily: metals can be easily separated with magnets. Light plastics are separated with blowers, and some plastics can be detected with high-tech infrared / UV scanners.
So when I say "easy to recycle", I'm talking about Aluminum (non-magnetic but metal, so easy to sort automatically) or plastic bags (air-blowers catch these).
Everything else is dug around by hand by humans. If the humans can't figure it out, they throw it away immediately. Depending on the location, sometimes even Pizza boxes are thrown into the landfill by humans.
Pizza Box is one of those things that's highly localized. You can't put a Pizza Box into a paper-recycling plant: the oils contaminate the mix. But you can shred a Pizza Box into a compost bin.
IIRC, some areas only have paper-plants (so Pizza Boxes are thrown away there). So you gotta check with your local laws, regulations, and local plants to know for sure.
EDIT: It seems like some areas can't handle plastic bags. It really depends.
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For something like a K-Cup: it contains so little coffee that I find it unlikely that its worth the human's time to scoop out the coffee grounds. Its probably easier for the humans to throw a K-Cup away rather than manually labor in the recycling mix.
If you have a Walmart nearby, there's a good chance you've got a place to recycle plastic bags. They generate a ton of them and as part of their greenwashing they usually have recycling stations available for the plastic bags.
In the article they mentions that they combine 5 different layers of plastic to allow the k-cups to keep the coffee inside fresh. I believe this makes the plastic non-recyclable
The article is from 2015. The plastic for certain cups (see: https://www.keurig.com/recyclable ) is recyclable as of earlier this year, and all k-cups are switching to recyclable plastic within the next year.
My wife insisted we buy one of those dreadful machines for our kitchen. I relented only when I found little metal reusable k cups on Amazon. Now we grind a few beans and they go in the pod. It’s ok, better in a cafetiere though. Never bought a single actual keurig pod and she’s happy.
While instant coffee has a negative stigma I'm happy to see the speciality community stepping into this space as a way to possibly move people away from these machines. While the cost value is still not great (~$4 a cup) it's far less waste and the coffee (to me) is much better. There's currently three companies leading on this: Sudden, Swift Cup, and Voila. James Hoffman did a video on the three and discussed their pros/cons (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuLWwZiIcl0).
I've tried all three at various points in their tenure and agree with Jim's points in the video.
* Sudden was the first to make the splash and for a while I was subscribed to them, but I never felt like the coffee tasted right.
* Voila is my preferred option right now because they offer a good variety of roasters as well as feel the most consistent in taste.
* Swift has had some of the best tasting ones, but it's slightly less consistent than Voila for me. Their best one I've had is the partnership offering they have with ReAnimator.
K-cup provides people with the illusion that they are getting "real" coffee. Instant provides no such illusion, hence its stigma. K-cup coffee is awful, but people happily drink it. Instant coffee can actually be much better, yet people go "BLECH!" if you even mention it.
Every company wants in on this business model. Even tech companies. Adobe has already moved to the "you need to buy an adobe pod once per month in order to keep using Photoshop"
I don't understand why people have them in their homes (just make a pot of coffee, folks!), but I do understand why they have been so incredibly successful in offices: they are clean & convenient, and don't require everyone to agree on the same coffee at the same time. Each person can brew a cup as he wants one, there are no grounds to clean up, and a cup of fresh-brewed Keurig coffee — while nowhere near as good as good coffee — is far better than urn coffee which has been simmering for three hours.
For offices, Keurig machines are a Godsend. For homes, though, I just don't get it.
I don't even think K-Cup coffee is any good but I suppose that's a personal preference statement. Still, I prefer the paper filter ones. And even so, is it not more feasible to just brew a big pot of coffee that's "actually" good for the whole office?
At home I either do a French press or pour over with a reusable stainless steel filter then make a coffee scrub with the used grounds.
I've re-purposed my Keurig into a hot-water dispenser (and occasional refillable-k-cup coffee dispenser). It works well for me for that purpose.
Buying the actual K-Cups is very expensive and wasteful. Though in a pinch or in certain circumstances (workplace, etc) I'll keep a few handy that I got on sale or cheaper in bulk.
On a weird side note, used coffee grounds are sometimes used to bleach buffalo skulls white. So the art folks have been collecting k-cups to get the grounds which has greater participation than the old style coffee pots. I guess its convenient on both ends of the product cycle.
I've learned that Keurig is really trying to get more municipalities to even recycle at all, because so few can accept recyclable resources, even the #5 polypropylene that they make their recyclable cups out of. Compostable cups are not really realistic as well, since so few municipalities offer pickup, there's basically no consumer interest.
It's the sort of thing that made me sit up and realize what a bubble most of the tech world sits in. Composting and recycling is very much a "liberal urban thing" in the US. It seems like the culture is against cutting down on waste in any significant way.
McDonalds sells KCUPs that are compostable. Meaning you just put it in with your compost.
They also happen to be some of the best coffee you can get in a KCUP. It's my daily cup of joe.
Anyway if your city does not have compost you have bigger problems than KCUPs. If you do have compost, just get KCUPS that are biodegradable. It's way better than a system where KCUPs have to be recycled in a special way (like Nespresso does).
A little bit of a tangent, but man do Investors/Wall-Street love the Razor/Razor-Blade business models. Sell the hardware (i.e. the machine) at ~10-20% Gross Margin then sell the consumables at like 60-80% Gross Margin. See it a a lot with Healthcare companies. Doesn't always work, but when it does... Obviously, there are other business models that Investors/Wall Street likes better (i.e. SAAS).
Just want to point out that Keurig did make recyclable pods called K-Cup Vue, but the price per cup was noticeably more so people continued to go with the regular k-cup option. On top of that, it wasn't available at many brick and mortar stores. On top of that, the size differed causing everyone to buy a different, more expensive machine.
Over the last year or so there's been a big push from companies to sell biodegradable k-cups. In our office we're fully switched to Onecoffee, which are Keurig-compatible compostable pods: https://onecoffee.com/
And then get a bunch of Coffee Filters, usually $2 for ~100 of them. Bam. Cold Brew and its cheap as all heck too. Works on all kinds of coffee and tea in my experience.
Just batch it all up in one go, and you have enough coffee for the whole week. If you like it warm, put it in the microwave. The cold-brew process reduces the bitterness overall, so you get a different taste. But I prefer higher flavor and less bitterness that comes from the cold-brew process.
Nothing beats the convenience of cold brew. And you can use high-quality coffee with this method (K-Cups don't necessarily taste as good IMO. Less time for the coffee to infuse the flavor compared to traditional coffee making).
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Other tips:
1. Use a scale to measure coffee. Put the mason jar on the scale, and dump coffee into it until you reach your appropriate amount for your recipe. Somewhere in the order of 1-to-15 coffee-to-water ratio. (1750g of water to 120g of coffee. Varies per coffee you use however, so do it to taste). Water is 1-gram to 1-milliliter, 1kg to 1-liter. The Metric System is defined by the weight / volume of water, so its easy if you use Metric measurements. Scales are easier to use than measuring cups IMO. Scales mean fewer things to clean, while delivering more precision in measurements.
2. Mason Jars are standardized. Buy 3rd party caps, such as "Recap" (from https://www.recapmasonjars.com/ ) to make Mason Jars more usable. Both Wide-mouth and Standard-mouth jars are too wide in my experience, so "narrowing" the mouth with a Recap plastic top makes the pouring experience far better. The reason why I like Recap is because they use Rubber Gaskets to ensure a strong seal (a lot of random Amazon crap doesn't have a Gasket, and you get leaky coffee all over your pants if you use them).
3. Use high-quality filters to make the purest water possible. Coffee reacts to a lot of things in water, so its exceptionally important to filter as well as possible.
>Throw coffee + water into a big jar (~2 quarts), leave in the fridge for 12-hours. Filter, and you have ~1.7ish quarts of cold-brew coffee.
This works for home or personal use. But in a communal, office setting where nobody knows whose stuff is whose or how old anything is it's a recipe for someone drinking from a moldy bottle.
Label your mason jars in the communal fridge. Its my coffee, I don't want anyone else drinking my coffee. There are some nice Mason Jar labels which dissolve in water (so you can wash them in the dishwasher when you bring it home each week).
Basically: put cold brew into the home fridge on Saturday. Wake up Sunday to do the filtering (roughly 1.7 liters of cold brew). A "standard" cup of coffee is 6oz, which is 170 milliliters.
Bring your ~1700 milliliters of coffee to work (labeled!!) in a Mason Jar on Monday. Drink 2-cups / day (average) from Monday through Friday. Bring the mason jar home on Friday, wash it, and repeat the cold-brew / filtration process on Saturday / Sunday.
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I'm sure I'm saving the environment and stuff. But really, I do this because its more convenient. Its far faster for me to open up my mason jar recap, pour out 6oz of coffee, and then return to my desk.
Sometimes, I split it up into 16oz jars on Sunday as well. In case I wanna leave some at home, or drink something on the drive to work. But a singular giant 64oz jar sitting in my office fridge has plenty of benefits too. Ball offers jars in 8oz, 12oz, 14oz, and 16oz, 32oz, and 64oz sizes, so you have a lot of options for how you want to store your individual servings of cold brew.
In any case: even a K-Cup requires you to wait for the coffee to pour through the cup, which is slow due to the internal filter in the K-Cup. In essence: I've "time shifted" all of the filtration time to Sundays (where I have more time to wait for the filter), instead of during the workday.
>Its my coffee, I don't want anyone else drinking my coffee.
If we're concerned with the environmental impact of K-Cups this isn't really a solution. You need something that scales for the communal group instead of just individual consumption. If you're just talking about coffee for yourself you could just as easily recommend everyone brings their own beans and keep and aeropress at work. Or just make pourover for themselves by keeping some kalitas in the kitchen.
> If we're concerned with the environmental impact of K-Cups this isn't really a solution.
I'm simply talking about the convenience factor, personally.
> If you're just talking about coffee for yourself you could just as easily recommend everyone brings their own beans and keep and aeropress at work. Or just make pourover for themselves by keeping some kalitas in the kitchen.
Those options are no where nearly as convenient as K-Cups, or Cold brew. People use K-Cups because of the convenience factor.
When I pour my cold brew, I don't need to do anything at all. No cleanup (not even throwing away anything). Its purely pouring out of a 64oz Mason Jar, which I clean once a week at home (and put more coffee in).
K-Cups are almost as convenient. But in comparison to the Mason-Jar method, you have to wait for the filter (K-Cups pour relatively slowly), you have to wait for the water to return to a ideal temperature (I don't like my coffee to burn me. I prefer to gulp the cold brew ASAP). In any case, K-Cups are very convenient, just not QUITE as convenient as cold brew. There's usually a line in the Keurig machine too at my office, since its a popular device.
Once we're talking about Aeropresses, now you have a cleanup stage. Which means you're touching the icky sponge in the office kitchen. You've also got to measure the proper amount of coffee. That's a LOT of work if you only plan to drink 6oz to 12oz of coffee.
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The hack works because:
1. Making 1750 mL of coffee at a time is convenient. Bigger batches means less work in the aggregate.
2. The recipe itself is incredibly easy. Less than 5-minutes prep time on Saturday (120g of Coffee + 1750 mL of Water), less than 10-minutes waiting for the filter. And I can do other things while waiting for the filter to go through, its mostly a passive process.
3. 32oz or 64oz mason jars are surprisingly space-efficient uses of the office fridge. You don't really use much space when you do this.
Based on the discussion, it sounds like there may be ways to optimize the filteration process that I wasn't aware of. I'll play around with the recipe as I go along, but its relatively little work for a whole lot of coffee.
Cold brew is incredible. I've been using one of these [1] once a week and it makes really great coffee. It's easy to clean, making it just takes waiting for water to drain through, and all the waste is grounds. It's really fun to try different syrups in it too. I'd also highly recommend using a coarse grind.
I think you may have just solved my problem. I assume coarse grind takes less time to filter, since its got bigger particles (which don't clog as easily) ??
I'm going to experiment with that when my current batch of coffee is done. Thanks for the tip.
Yeah, it took me a few weak brews to figure that out since I usually go as fine as possible for Aeropress/Mokapot coffee. Coarse makes it way stronger and filtering doesn't take as long.
Cold coffee is just not the same as a hot cup of joe. Also that still sounds like a lot of prep the night before. What if I forget? Do I just not have coffee the next day? That's not convenient.
> Cold coffee is just not the same as a hot cup of joe.
Agreed. It tastes different for sure. But I actually prefer cold brew's taste. YMMV, since everyone has different tastes.
Cold Coffee's main advantage is that I can gulp it without waiting. K-Cups are so hot that I usually have to wait and blow on the coffee before drinking. Cold Brew is more convenient for my personal life-style. But I 100% recognize this is a taste / lifestyle choice.
If you're purely in it for the heat, you can simply microwave the coffee once you pull it out of the fridge. 90-seconds is sufficient to heat a cup of coffee from 40F (refrigerator storage) to 140+F. Cold brew tastes slightly different however, so this is purely a convenience play.
> Also that still sounds like a lot of prep the night before.
No. Its a once-a-week prep. Cold Brew Coffee tastes fresh for more than a week. I dunno how long its shelf-life is (I always finish it within a week), but... its definitely got huge shelf life. I wouldn't be surprised if it could last roughly a month. As long as your container is airtight, the coffee has always tasted fresh in my experience.
As such, you should do this in large batches. 2-quart jars are my personal batch size (yielding roughly 1.7 quarts of cold brew coffee), since that's sufficient for my drinking habits.
> What if I forget?
What if you forget to buy more K-Cups?
Again, this is a once-a-week prep situation. I honestly go to the grocery store more often than I make cold-brew coffee (or tea. Actually, I usually make tea).
I wouldn't be surprised if this method scaled to higher amounts: like to gallon-sizes or more. 1.7 Quarts (out of a 2-quart mason jar) is sufficient for a once-a-week prep style in my life.
What, I had no clue it was so easy... OK, I might have to try this! I thought it involved some french press type of process. Seems perfect for summer months especially! Thanks haha :)
The only problem is that it takes ~10 minutes to filter that much coffee. You may have to change out the filters 2 or 3 times during the process.
Coffee Grounds clog up those filters and really slow down the process. But once its done, you've got so much coffee that you can use conveniently. Just gotta find the ~15 minutes to work the filters.
My personal preference is to cold-brew Tea however. I'm more of a tea person than a coffee person. But I switch it up every now and then to change the flavors.
Keurig created a hardware sales model orthogonal to printers. That is, people are excited to buy the recurring element (pods) and accept that the several-hundred-dollar device is just a means to an end. They don't feel ripped off, compared to buying printer ink that costs nearly as much as a new printer.
Yeah, we had them at my last office. They were made of a paper lid, fiber bag like filter for the grounds, and then a small ring of compostable plastic for rigidity. Worked great, but even more expensive than the normal K-cups. We ended up going back to making big pots of coffee because it's easy enough, cheap, and usually tastier.
IIRC, they've transitioned (or are in the middle of transitioning) to recyclable cups.
I believe you can green bin the contents (if you have that service where you live), and recycle the plastic container, with the foil seal being the only thing that goes to landfill.
To be honest, who is going to actually separate all 3 of those pieces? In Canada, President's Choice (among others) makes a fully compostable k cup that is about $0.50/pod.
I think we’ve probably all regretted doing things we’ve done to “pay the mortgage” at various times in our past — that doesn’t necessitate that we donate that money to charity.
If your argument is that scale or extent of publicity is the differentiator, then we’re not talking apples and oranges: we’re talking apples and bigger apples.
The decision to be philanthropic is personal. Both in the sense that it’s up to the individual to choose based on their own feelings and in the sense that it’s, frankly, no one else’s business.
So is the decision to be regretful but he sure went public about that. It's a little hypocritical to publicly chastise himself, "boy I wish I hadn't done this awful thing that I profited massively from" and then do nothing else.
Also an ocean and a puddle are both bodies of water but I wouldn't say the differentiator is scale.
We should start having a plastic tax per gram of plastic, and based on the type of plastic (how easy it can be recycled). Maybe if these products became really expensive and people bought less of them, companies will find other methods. I'm very, very sick and tired of the over use of plastic in our society. Plastic does play a useful role in our lives, but I don't think every product we buy needs to be in that thick clear plastic that is very hard to open without cutting the hell out of your hand. Companies claim this is a theft deterrent, and it might be, but I think we can do better than the over use of all of this plastic. It's just everywhere now, including your body.
> I feel so bad about this product I created. I don't feel as bad about the money I'm making though, and no, I won't close the company out of principle. I just make too much money from it.
> But he left the company in 1997, selling his ownership of the product for $50,000.
He can’t close anything down. He made $50k out of it.
> The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) estimated that in 2006, injuries from plastic packaging resulted in approximately 6,000 emergency-room visits.
> Along with the potential health hazards, environmental concerns have prompted calls for the elimination of clamshell packaging. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, about one-third of consumer garbage is packaging, and plastics comprise 12 per cent of U.S. waste each year.
Sounds good in theory, but I haven't specifically checked it out. Does it produce less/no pollution/toxins when creating it? Is it truly biodegradable with 0 contaminants/toxins left over? How much energy is required to produce it vs other plastics or paper/cardboard? How much corn does it take, and is it economically feasible if we shifted, let's say, 50% of current plastics to biodegradable where it would make sense (I imagine there are scenarios where biodegradable plastic couldn't/shouldn't be used)?
I'm more of the mindset to just eliminate plastic where it isn't really necessary to begin with, like in packaging, where it's just more convenient for the manufacturer to wrap it in plastic as a theft deterrent.
Business-wise they are genius though. Take something and make it ten times as expensive.