The coffee maker that ate America
Mar 6, 2015, 6:28 AM | Updated: 10:48 am
There is a moral dilemma facing environmentally-conscious users of Keurig coffee makers. They feel guilty because of a viral video showing what would happen if all their discarded K-cups assembled themselves into an angry monster, and started firing coffee pods at people.
It’s not pretty.
Even the man who invented the Keurig 20 years ago, John Sylvan, feels guilty.
A reporter from the CBC asked Sylvan how the coffee machine ended up in everybody’s home, and he replied, “I am absolutely mystified by that.”
Well, I’m not mystified. It’s because caffeine is addictive and people are lazy.
There are two ways to look at this. If you stacked up the 9 billion K-cups sold last year, you could build almost 15 Washington Monuments.
However, if you crushed the same amount of K-cups, you could easily pave them over with about a mile of Interstate highway and no one would notice. (Except for the unexplainable donut urge on the way to work.)
As the CBC interviewer put it, “We’re going to be buried in K-cups at some point if we don’t do something about it. So whose responsibility is it, then?”
Well, for $12, you can buy a re-useable metal filter that you don’t have to throw away. So if you don’t do that, I guess it’s your responsibility.
Although a true environmentalist would ditch the hot coffee habit entirely and just drink warm tap water. No more K-cups, no more stained neckties, no more scalded genitals.
Problem solved.