BUT I LOVE MY KEURIG!

A coffee purist gets up in the morning and puts the kettle of filtered water on to boil.  While the water boils he grinds exactly 63.8 grams of fresh coffee beans that have been kept in a sealed container.  The freshly ground coffee is put in the gold filter that sits in the ceramic funnel on top of his coffee pot. All is ready. When the water begins to boil, the purist removes the water from the heat and counts out 11 seconds.  Research has shown that the perfect temperature is 11 seconds below boiling. (Of course that is altered by altitude and other variables, but it generally works.)  Slowly and carefully 1.42L of water is poured into the gold filter containing the freshly ground coffee. The moment of truth. The tremendous aroma!  This process takes time, but it delivers a perfect cup of coffee which can be adjusted to taste by adjusting the coffee:water ratio.

Believe it or not, this was me for many, many years. Ask Pamela. This is the way I make coffee while we live in Willy (our 16' vintage trailer) in the wilderness of Montana eleven miles from the nearest "developed" area.(1) Actually this is still my preferred way of brewing coffee.

But what you probably don't know is that I also have a Keurig machine.  Yes, me! The coffee purist. I had avoided the Keurig because I wanted my fresh coffee and because I was too cheap to pay 60-75 cents a cup for coffee. If I wanted to pay that much I'd go to Starbucks. (I'm sure you're not surprised that I have a Starbucks gold card which means that I can get my coffee for 50 cents or less per cup.) My first live encounter with Keurig was at my daughter's home in Huntsville, AL.  My son-in-law, also an avid coffee lover, had acquired a Keurig.  It was nice. To make a long story short (too late!), I ended up buying a Keurig for when I was being lazy or didn't want a pot.

Now that I have to admit in public that a coffee purist like me loves his Keurig, I'm confronted with a horrible reality.  My beloved Keurig cartridges might be the next big environmental threat!

I'm not ready to throw out my Keurig and hop on the 'ban the Keurig' band wagon quite yet.  But the problem of the pure volume of K-cups in landfills is staggering.  Pamela and I use an average of two K-cups a day. That is 10.22 kg per year. If 1 million homes do the same, that would be 1,200 metric tons (1005.86 long tons or 2000# tons for those who don't use the metric system.)  Based on an average cargo load of 22 tons per 53' semi-trailer, that would mean our K-cups would fill >45 semi-trailers. That's a lot.

But, alas, it gets worse.  I tried to look up the number of Keurig K-cup machines sold.  I found a lot of information but not that specific number. I know the number is out there, but I didn't want to take all day on this article, so I found that there was a recall of 7 million machines in 2014. Since the 7 million machines only represented a mini-brew style (using the same K-cup) we can assume that there are at least 7 million machines being used, which is most likely a very, very low estimate. Based on that number, we now have 7,154 metric tons or 325 semi-trailer loads of used K-cups going into our landfill each year. And that's just the tippy, tippy top of the proverbial iceberg.

Before we get all bent out of shape, those of us who like the convenience or love our Keurig machine need to let Keurig know that they need to put a lot of that tremendous profit they're making into research on making the K-cup recyclable.  Oh, if you don't think they have the financial ability check out Keurig's financial position at http://ycharts.com/companies/GMCR or wherever you want. When I checked it they had an 11.80% profit margin (quarterly), only a 0.0465 debit-to-equity ratio, a 33.78 price-earnings ratio, and selling for $126.26/share with the high of $154.50/share on Nov. 17, 2014. That's financially stable.(2) 

Good environmental stewards and big business do not have to be adversarial. 


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(1)  When in Montana we use Montana Coffee Co. beans.  The company is a fair trade company and roasts up some great coffees.  We brought a lot home with us and gave it as gifts. I'm not aware of its availability much farther away from home base than the adjoining states. We frequented a small coffee shop in Columbia Falls, MT., called The Montana Coffee Company about 27 miles from our camp, that not only had fine coffee but a great food menu which had several vegetarian offerings. I was in heaven!  

(2)  What I shared here were the numbers which show a company with very little debt and an excellent return on the invested dollar. Those who know all about what these numbers, and the plethora of other data, mean will tell you that it is still very complex.  However, in this case, I believe that any financial expert looking at these numbers would consider Keurig, solely owned by GMCR, is a very financially healthy company.