Category: Keurig Green Mountain

Keurig purchasing less certified coffee

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On March 11, 2015

In Certifications, Keurig Green Mountain, Retail and specialty roasters

I have been updating the data table that explains how much eco-certified coffee the large coffee companies buy.  The latest company to get updated is Keurig Green Mountain (formerly Green Mountain Coffee Roasters) as they have recently released their 2014 sustainability report.

You can view all the data yourself in the table, but I have created a graphic that shows Keurig is purchasing less eco-certified coffee over the last few years.

KGM2014The graph shows the percentage of the different types of coffee they buy (the amount in metric tons is given at the top of each bar, and shows an increase in tonnage of over 350%). The green colors are the eco-certified purchases — Rainforest Alliance, organic, and Fair Trade that is also certified organic*. Red is Fair Trade that is not organic (and remember that Fair Trade is not an eco-certification).

Gray and black is coffee that carries no certification at all. Black is “conventionally” sourced coffee — usually coffee brought through brokers that is not traceable to specific origin. Gray is coffee that is what Keurig calls “Farm Identified,” and they are placing a lot of emphasis on it. It’s not certified, but they know where it came from. Their philosophy is “When we know who produces our coffee, we are closer to knowing how they produce it.” Of course, certified coffees are traceable, and the production methods by definition are already known. Buying less certified coffee and more “Farm Identified” coffee seems like a leap backwards in understanding how their coffee is grown.

You can see eco-certified coffee (green bars) remains steady from 2009-2011; the average amount for those three years was 22.6%. But KGMs purchases of eco-certified coffees has been steadily decreasing since 2012, from 19.1% to 17.3% and now to 12.6%. The average for the past three years is 16.2%,  a 28% decrease from 2009-2011. Tweet  This decline more or less aligns with the popularity of K-Cups, which has been accelerating over this period (as seen in this depressing graph from the recent Washington Post article on America’s love of bad coffee).

The KGM sustainability report states a 2020 goal of sourcing 100% of their coffee (and other products) to their Responsible Sourcing Guidelines. These are a sort of glorified set of minimum standards that remind me a lot of the “let’s not break any laws” guidelines of 4C compliance. You can read the 12-page document yourself, but the environmental section is brief, and says that KGM “…expect[s] all suppliers to demonstrate environmental responsibility” and that they should “protect and restore biodiversity.” Further, they “encourage” their agricultural suppliers to “Protect and restore soil and water resources” and “Appropriately manage and/or eliminate their use of hazardous agrochemicals.” That’s it — no quantifiable requirements, thresholds, or metrics. As far as coffee goes, almost any third-party certification would be an improvement.

Overall, a continued disappointing trend for a company that used to be a sustainability leader.

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*The company stopped breaking out how much of their Fair Trade coffee was also organic in 2012. Figures after that period are calculated at 47% of their Fair Trade coffee, which is the percent Fair Trade USA provided as of 2009.

K-Cups: Still trashy after all these years

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On March 2, 2015

In K-Cups/Keurig brewers: alternatives, Keurig Green Mountain

Update: In early 2016, the New York Times reported on Keurig’s annoucement that they would finally be coming out with a K-Cup made of plastic recyclable by typical municipal facilities. But it also pointed out the continued environmentally-negative aspects of K-Cups outlined below, including high energy costs to produce and potentially low consumer cooperation. It did not address problems with the size of the cups jamming sorting machines at recycling facilities, or potential contamination if consumers don’t remove the lids. Or, oh yeah, the insane cost. See this post for alternatives.

Keurig Green Mountain (KGM) has released its 2014 sustainability report. As far as their progress on reducing waste from K-Cups, the story is much the same as last year… and many previous years.

  • K-Cups are still not recyclable*.
  • The goal is still to make all K-Cups recyclable by the year 2020.
  • The report notes that K-Cups were first introduced in 1998. Thus (if successful), it will have taken KGM 22 years to achieve their goal.

THIS IS CRAZY. First and most obvious, how many K-Cups will have been produced by KGM and sent to a landfill by that point? In  2013 alone, it was estimated at 8.3 billion. What about third-party manufactured packs that are produced now that the original K-Cups are off-patent?   How many of these are and will be produced? Are or will any of them be recyclable?

Second, will there even be any of the brewers around still using the original K-Cups by 2020? It sort of seems as if this exercise will be a moot point by then: the product will have run its course, with billions still sitting in landfills.

Meanwhile, KGMs newer Keurig 2.0 brewer compatible portion packs — the Vue Pack, K-Carafe, and Bolt Pack — are recyclable, sort of. They are made of #5 plastic (polypropylene) and can be recycled according to KGM, in 60% of U.S. communities — although often not curbside. Note that it requires several steps by consumers, and extra effort tends to reduce the number of units actually recycled, especially among uber-convenience oriented Keurig users. The overall recycling rate in the U.S. is only 34%, a low rate of compliance which reduces the significance of single-serve coffee portion packs being made of recyclable material.

Isn’t it so much better for the environment to create a cup of coffee that only produces compostable organic coffee grounds? This can be achieved, for less money and with superior results, with any number of methods, such as a Hario pour over cone  or Chemex and a reusable filter, or a French Press.

And, by the way, the Keurig brewers are manufactured in China and Malaysia.

You can read more about the high cost of K-Cups and other single-serve capsule coffees here, and a summary of reusable alternatives to K-Cups for Keurig brewers here.

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*I’m still surprised at how many people say they recycle K-Cups. As I — and KGM — have explained many times they are made out of a plastic that cannot be recycled. It doesn’t matter if you peel off the lids, remove the filter, grounds and all the adhesive, and carry them to your recycling center delivered on a velvet pillow.  The facility will sort them out and send them to the landfill or incinerator. If they don’t and they get mixed in with other plastic, they can potentially contaminate a whole batch as surely as a turd in a punchbowl.

P.S. After I completed this post but prior to publishing it, The Atlantic came out with a great article on the wastefulness of K-Cups. Take a look.

Greenwashing at Keurig Green Mountain

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On March 24, 2014

In Keurig Green Mountain

keurig-logoKeurig Green Mountain (KGM) has released its 2013 sustainability report. This is the company formerly known as Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. The CEO notes that the name change “better reflects who we are as a Company…” In other words — they are now focused on single-cup brewers and coffee. It’s hard to imagine how a company whose primary products dominate one of the most spectacularly wasteful trends in consumer products in decades can make many sustainability claims. Unfortunately, the way KGM did it, in part, was by making statements that qualify as greenwashing.

First, let’s get one fact straight: K-Cups are not recyclable. KGM baldly states this right on “Reducing Product Waste” page of their sustainability report. People still argue with me about this but hey, just because you throw the thing (or some of its parts) in the recycle bin, does not mean it gets recycled.

Keurig Green Mountain noted they recovered 4.7 million K-Cups in 2013…without disclosing that is only 0.05% of the total number of K-Cups that they produced that year.

KGM states that they have a target date of 2020 to make 100% of K-Cups recyclable. They have been talking about this since shortly after they took over Keurig in 2006. I asked them about it in 2007 and they replied they were working on finding renewable materials for the K-Cups.

If not recycling, then…

The report explains, “While we continue to work toward a 100% recyclable K-Cup pack, we also offer programs for responsible disposal of the K-Cup packs that are currently on the market.” KGM went on to describe their Grounds to Grow On program where workplace customers can return K-Cups for composting and energy-to-waste processing; I wrote about in detail here.

KGM goes on to tout that in 2013, the program recovered an estimated 4.7 million used K-Cup packs. That number may seem impressive, but in 2013 KGM produced 8.3 billion K-Cups.  Providing a large figure of the number of K-Cups diverted from landfills in a sustainability report without noting that it only represents 0.05% of the K-Cups produced in a year is not only misleading, but actually represents a huge failure of sustainability.

Comparing apples and oranges

The Assessing Product Impact page explains KGM’s Life Cycle Assessments on their K-Cup packs, and incorpates obfuscation as a means of greenwashing.

My emphasis added to this statement: “On average, when compared with competitive batch brewers, customers waste less brewed coffee when they use a single serve Keurig brewer than when they brew a full pot of coffee”.

  • For home use, they compared one of their at-home single serve brewers (no model specified) to a cheap ($21), 12-cup Mr. Coffee with no small-batch setting; they didn’t specify their own or the other competitor’s commercial models.
  • Obviously, it is wasteful for me to buy an extra large, 12 slice pizza if I only want a slice or two. KGM knows that waste is not an issue if a consumer simply makes one or two cups of coffee using a pour-over or other dead-easy method.  How much was wasted? They didn’t say. It is a FACT that using K-Cups is a WASTE of money. I gave an example that I would have to dump 11 gallons of coffee in a year before it became more cost effective to use K-Cups.

KGM contends the disposal of K-Cups is a small portion of the total environmental impact because “significant impacts occur in the cultivation of coffee beans, use of brewing systems, and the material used in the products’ packaging.”

  • Since the specific thing they are assessing is a brewing method and the packaging, it is misrepresentative to consider steps prior to that (cultivation, processing, transport to roasting facilities…things that are similar among most brewed coffee products) when evaluating the environmental impact of the K-Cup.
  • They listed four areas of environmental impact they did evaluate (admitting in a footnote that one is “not a true environmental impact category,” although they showed a graph for it).  None of them showed impacts of waste disposal, product-to-packaging ratio, or for that matter toxicity of their proprietary #7 plastic blend used in the K-Cups.

What about certified coffee sourcing?

The amount of Rainforest Alliance coffee purchased by KGM has been decreasing, from 9% in 2011 to 5% in 2013. In the past, KGM has indicated how much of their Fair Trade certified coffee was organic, but the last two years have been lumping it all together.  Fair Trade standards themselves have very few specific and measurable environmental criteria, and none related specifically to coffee, so knowing the amount of organic coffee purchased is important. I calculated a five-year average of 72% of the Fair Trade total, but it has ranged from 59% to 87%. I don’t see the figures presented by KGM as misleading or greenwashing, but I do wonder why they are now lumping all Fair Trade coffee and not showing how much is organic.

Another page shows that 70% of KGM’s coffee sales in 2013 were non-certified coffee, and you can read more about their certification goals here.

KGM is going the way of using their own supplier guidelines as an alternative or supplement to third-party certifications, with a goal of 100% of their primary agricultural products sourced under these guidelines by 2020. These guidelines are no substitute for strong (or even so-so) certification criteria. Take a look at the brief, generic environmental section (PDF) – no specific requirements, goals, or metrics (“All suppliers should protect and restore biodiversity” and “We encourage agricultural partners to protect and restore soil and water resources”). These are weak non-standards that offer little in the way of providing a framework for clear, meaningful, measurable criteria for environmental sustainability.

Pablo Escobar Conundrum

Writing about KGM’s use of greenwashing pains me. This is a company that has a long history of supporting and promoting social and environmental justice and sustainability in so many ways. They still do amazing work in coffee communities, including access to clean water, food security for coffee farmers, and the fight against coffee leaf rust. These are powerful and important initiatives, for which KGM deserves praise. And one can certainly argue that when KGM makes a pile of money on K-Cups and single-cup brewers, they have more money to invest at origin.

Do the positive things that KGM does offset the hundreds of thousands of pounds of non-biodegradable plastic K-Cups being dumped in landfills each year? I call this the Pablo Escobar Conundrum, after the notorious drug lord who built hospitals, schools, churches, and soccer fields, and frequently contributed to charity. I’m not equating KGM with Pablo Escobar, only the dilemma of entities that do both tremendous good as well as substantial harm. We all know two wrongs don’t make a right. I don’t know how to figure out how many “rights” it takes to cancel out a “wrong.”

Green Mountain to fund climate change projects

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On February 17, 2009

In Climate change, Coffee and the environment, Keurig Green Mountain, Retail and specialty roasters

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters will award four grants of $200,000 each to organizations with ideas to combat climate change in four core areas: transportation-related emissions (including GMCR’s product shipping), threats to coffee-growing communities (enormous, given that climate change is already pushing coffee production to higher altitudes), building political will, and empowering individual action. Grant recipients will also be required to meet with GMCR twice a year to help the company work on reducing and mitigating its own carbon footprint.

The last two grant categories seem a little amorphous, but I’m quite enthusiastic about the potential for development of programs that can help farmers adjust to climate change (for those that can; the solution for many farmers may actually be to transition to other crops, unfortunately).

This grant project is part of a larger effort by GMCR to focus on climate change through changing business practices and raising awareness (you can read their statement on climate change here).

Spending $800,000 in the current economic crisis by a company that sells what is essentially a “luxury” item is, I think, a pretty strong statement of commitment to environmental responsibility. Kudos to GMCR.

 

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