K-Cup creator John Sylvan regrets inventing Keurig coffee pod system
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Business-wise they are genius though. Take something and make it ten times as expensive.
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:
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.
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.
Unfortunately this hasn’t resulted in a repairable iphone. Yet again corporate incentives and lack of moral ownership work against consumer interests.
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.
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.
Apple doesn't really win or lose much with the home repair market, and as mad as some people get over that, the numbers aren't lying.
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'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]
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.
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.
I know nothing about this and have no strong opinions about it one way or the other, but that phrasing is hilarious.
> 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.
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.
It was the automotive industry that invented and perfected it, not Apple.
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".
Apple is serious in a way no other brand I know of is about the recyclability of their products. https://www.apple.com/environment/
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.
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.
[1] https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/63-percent-of-all-iphon...
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.
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I think Apple is doing "greenwashing". If they were serious they would make their devices repairable and upgradeable.
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.
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.
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 ban stuff because bans would be full of loopholes for "necessary" usage.
You can't just appeal to people's better nature because humans are humans.
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.
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.
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/
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
(That's not actually me - I use a Rancilio Silvia, buy my beans in a brown paper bag and dig my coffee pucks into our vege garden).
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.
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.
If the problem is waste, that's something for the government to sort out.
Do you mean that they need to manage it via regulations? Or deal with the externalities of all that waste? Because in the latter, government = us.
Everybody loves plastic bags but they are taking them away from us. K-Cups could (should?) have a similar fate.
Yes, let's put a $10 tax on each. But then you would probably complain about overregulation.
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.
One of the tent pole ideas of capitalism is that people are rational actors/consumers. They aren't.
That's one way it could be the worst invention of the last few decades.
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.
Capitalism is the ideal system for encouraging and refining this process, it's the "bottled water" strategy.
K-cups are decidedly bad, because they waste plastics which are non-renewable. Dusters could be made, today, using only renewable resources.
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.
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.
Having said all that, the nespresso sales stand in a local city centre shopping arcade seems to always have people there...
One theory I have is due to the prevalence of smoking back then. Nicotine is great for appetite suppression.
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.
Give it a try.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
I don't get this. If this is important to you, why not use a system that didn't require recycling in the first place?
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.
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.
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.
The tasteful way is to invite people to visit your home where they can see it.
The tacky way is to tell people about it.
Another excellent example. Now we have coffee which tastes awful and still takes longer.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course they do.
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.
Query your friends and family some time.
I disagree on your second point, we can think that it's a morally wrong view to believe that our personal time is worth more than the earth's health.
People like to virtue-signal but when they really want something all convictions go out the window.
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.
And as I wrote that last bit, I realized that I should not have said "in the _world_".
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.
Ours is a small UK city, larger cities the traffic is slower still.
Somehow, I don't think that's were "most" of the people live.
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.
Not only were developers given fewer reasons to leave the office, but the non-men on staff weren't stuck with maintaining a coffee service.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000N2YKQ0/ref=oh_aui_sear...
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 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.
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.
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]
1- https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2013/ap...
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.
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.
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.
Second, that sounds like a heinously inefficient recycling program that relies on the goodwill of consumers... an extremely weak attempt at addressing the problem.
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.
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.
it's like wrapping dental floss around a skyscraper the size of a slightly smaller earth
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.
Litter is a separate issue but kpods are not a type of waste that typically gets littered (unlike soda cans, etc.)
We're not concerned about whether we can bury it in the ground.
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.
How about its effect on our water table?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
E.g., https://amzn.to/2LraTIB or https://amzn.to/2RcREHQ
That gives you most of the convenience of a Keurig without the environmental impact.
Can usually find them for about $10 for that size box at my local grocery store.
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.
Plus my experience when I owned a Kurig was not pleasant at the end, with exploding K-Cups.
Even ignoring disabled people, the difference between easy and very easy is a huge gulf.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/local/ozarks/2018/05/...
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.
For offices, Keurig machines are a Godsend. For homes, though, I just don't get it.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Given that 91% of plastic made hasn't been recycled, it does seem like "just make it all compostable, who cares where it goes" is a better approach. (https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/plastic-produced...)
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.
2-quart mason jars are like, $10 for a 6-pack.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/JARDEN-HOME-BRANDS-68100-Ball-6Pa...
Cold-brew in one Mason Jar, pour / filter into a 2nd jar. Heck, do 2 or 3 different flavors at once.
Get a pour-over filter holder (ceramic or glass works well in my experience):
https://www.target.com/p/melitta-sr-pour-over-cone-coffeemak...
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.
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.
See my comment here for an example schedule: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18718842
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.
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.
https://www.bedbathandbeyond.com/store/product/ball-reg-cann...
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.
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.
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.
Optimizing for time is the name of the game.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Hario-Mizudashi-Coffee-1000ml-Red/dp/...
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.
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.
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.
Unless he donated half (or majority) of his profits to try to correct this mistake expressing 'regret' is kind of meaningless.
update i stand corrected, my bad for not reading full post before commenting
> It should be noted that John quit the company in 1997 and sold his idea for $50,000
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.
Oh wait...
We're talking apples and oranges here.
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.
Or, instead of a tax, a deposit which you get some or all of it back when you recycle it like we do with aluminum cans. Plastic is only about 100 years old, and look what we've done. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-great-pacific-garbage-patch...
Edit: removed erroneous editorialized comment
> 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.
https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2017/03/04/clamshell-pa...
I am having a hard time finding current numbers. 6,000 in 2006...12 years ago. I'm sure it's only climbed since then.
> 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.
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.
You are spreading misinformation, you should edit or delete your comment.