Last summer, a reader critiqued a column I wrote about Keurig Green Mountain, the Vermont company whose name is synonymous with coffee and coffeemakers, lamenting that I made no mention of the environmental impacts of its single-serve K-Cup brew pods.
Much as she loves coffee, the reader said in an email, she won’t buy the machine out of concern for how much plastic waste is produced — which, by some estimates I have since seen, amounts to some 10 billion K-Cups thrown annually into North American landfills.
But that could be changing.
I was reminded of the email this week when I saw an odd-looking pod in a coupon ad for Chock full o’ Nuts coffee, which now boasts a single-serve “filter cup” without the K-Cup’s typical plastic.
Behind the brand is Massimo Zanetti Beverage USA of Virginia, which is looking to further reduce the environmental impact of single-serve pods by making them biodegradable and compostable.
MZB-USA, as it is known, took a stake last year in Club Coffee, a Canadian custom roaster that worked with university researchers to produce a pod, dubbed PurPod100, that has been certified as 100 percent compostable by the Biodegradable Products Institute. (It also is compatible with Keurig brewers.)
Key to certification was the ring that holds the pod in place for brewing – it’s made from coffee chaff, the skin of the bean that is shed during roasting. The University of Guelph’s Bioproducts Discovery and Development Centre, which develops agricultural alternatives to petroleum-based components, patented the formula for the ring.
Besides the ring, the lid and filter also are fully compostable. Together with used coffee grounds, the pods are promoted as “guilt free” because they can be tossed into the trash (or separated into Canadians’ municipal composting bins), where they will break down into soil in about six months, according to the companies.
Others are hard at work on compostable pods, too. And efforts are under way by various producers of K-Cups to step up recycling of the cups’ plastic components.
Indeed, Keurig Green Mountain has pledged to make its K-Cup packs fully recyclable by 2020, and is evaluating switching to a readily recyclable resin, common in yogurt and butter containers, for the cup itself.
Spokeswoman Suzanne Dulong said the company is “working collaboratively” with the recycling and plastics industries “to transition incremental portions of our K-Cup pods to a recyclable format each year” to meet the 2020 goal.
Meantime, MBZ-USA expects to make PurPod100 coffee pods available for purchase online for its Chock full o’ Nuts and Hills Bros. brands as early as April. In-store stocking will follow shortly thereafter. “We believe that 100 percent compostable is the right solution that allows coffee lovers to enjoy their favorite brands while helping to protect our environment,” Brian Kubicki, the company’s vice president of marketing, told me in an email.
Marlene Kennedy is a freelance columnist. Opinions expressed in her column are her own and not necessarily the newspaper’s. Reach her at [email protected]
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