A Note on Keurig Cups

During reunion weekend, we drank a lot of coffee. Instead of coming from a drip machine, however, most of our coffee came in single-servings from a giant Keurig machine.

Now, I've never been the biggest fan of Keurig. Maybe that makes me an elitist snob, but it just seems so impractical and wasteful to me. While I was working this weekend, one of my friends mentioned to me that the inventor of Keurig cups has since renounced his creation, and that set me off on a wild Internet-reading adventure.

The short of it:

John Slyvan, one of the original inventors of the Keurig cup back in 1990, envisioned Keurig machines as simple office installations, saying that his coworkers all had different tastes and that no one was willing to pay for coffee: "it was like the Mafia – you had to go around and extract money to pay the coffee guy...it was like my full-time job some days." So Slyvan stepped up his game and decided to create a way for all of his coworkers to get their preferred brew in the morning. So he and his roommate at Colby College, Peter Dragone, got together and began making the violently wasteful and overpriced cups.

Twenty-five years later, Keurig is still going strong. The machines are often sold at a loss with the expectation that the expensive single-serving cups will garner enough revenue to compensate. But Slyvan has since reconsidered his machine, calling it "kind of expensive to use" and saying that "I feel bad sometimes that I ever did it." The cups are neither recyclable nor biodegradable, and the cups are approximately five times more expensive than traditional drip coffee.

Now, I'll probably continue to drink Keurig coffee. As sad an excuse as this is, there are Keurig machines for students and faculty to use in most offices here at Wellesley. Although it would be more environmentally friendly to buy my own coffee, it's easier to pretend it's not an issue and to instead just take the K-cup coffee I get for free. I have no plans to buy a Keurig machine, ever, but I'm not going to turn down free coffee. Maybe I have weak morals, or maybe I'm addicted to caffeine, but it's true. And I acknolwedge that people like me are the reason why there are islands of trash in the ocean.

For now, I'm set in my ways, though maybe I'll cut back on my coffee consumption soon. And I'll certainly think a little harder the next time I make myself that single-serving cup of coffee.