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Today at my local Subaru dealer I spotted a Keurig recycling receptacle. Adjacent to it was a receptacle for snack bags. The service guy said they got it through Subaru Corporate and there was in fact a Subaru logo built into the container.
I have contacted the company, TerraCycle out of Trenton, NJ about getting something set up at my office. I and a few others have reusable Keurig pods but I don't know how many thousands of those K-pods have gone into the waste stream from our office alone.
Does anyone know how this works? Is it a PR thing run by Subaru of USA or are these things really made into park benches and whatnot?
Keurig pods are recyclable as long as your recycling center accepts #5.
No offense but that sounds like a rumor. I'd love to just toss plastic in a bin and make a wish.
Chinese processing facilities stopped accepting recycled plastic from America a few years ago because it was too contaminated. If I toss a K-cup into the recycling bin I'm throwing way more than just #5 plastic in there.
The setup I'm talking about, which I saw today for the first time, is a dedicated K-cup recycling regime. The company is called TerraCyle and their website is long on slick happy-talk marketing but short on details. That's why I am asking for details about recycling K-cups.
Not sure about what keurig is doing, but we recently bought a Nespresso pod coffee system. They send you a ups bag with every coffee order and you stick the used pods in, coffee and all, and once the bag is full you send it back to them (free to you) for recycling. The coffee & aluminum are then separated, coffee grounds get composted, and aluminum recycled. Kinda cool.
Keurig pods are recyclable as long as your recycling center accepts #5.
it is going to the landfill.
Plastics are very hard and expensive to segregate for 'up-stream' recycle. (Equal or higher use)
Plastics are an exceptional catalyst for refuse incineration vs landfill. Each has it's own issues, but a very well designed incinerator can be a big benefit to the community (excess power generation, and groundwater / preservation). This week I was doing some very rural exploration and ran onto (3) HUGE active landfills / trash burial. Terribly ridiculous that our society is still daily burying mountains our trash (as if it will disappear).
Not sure about what keurig is doing, but we recently bought a Nespresso pod coffee system. They send you a ups bag with every coffee order and you stick the used pods in, coffee and all, and once the bag is full you send it back to them (free to you) for recycling. The coffee & aluminum are then separated, coffee grounds get composted, and aluminum recycled. Kinda cool.
We also have a Nespresso machine and send the pods back for recycling. They provide free prepaid bags which we just drop off at the UPS place.
No offense but that sounds like a rumor. I'd love to just toss plastic in a bin and make a wish.
Chinese processing facilities stopped accepting recycled plastic from America a few years ago because it was too contaminated. If I toss a K-cup into the recycling bin I'm throwing way more than just #5 plastic in there.
The setup I'm talking about, which I saw today for the first time, is a dedicated K-cup recycling regime. The company is called TerraCyle and their website is long on slick happy-talk marketing but short on details. That's why I am asking for details about recycling K-cups.
"To recycle, once the K-Cup® pod is cool, peel the lid from the puncture hole in the center, empty the grounds and recycle. Click here for more information on recycling steps. Please check locally, #5 plastic is not yet recycled in all communities."
Again no offense, but in an office environment that means "throw it in the garbage". I've tried peeling the lid off a K-up, and I threw it in the garbage then went out & bought a reusable one of my own. Only 3 people in my office do that and the rest throw their used K-cups in the garbage.
I dug deeper on TerraCycle's website and for $214 you can get a postage-paid box that holds 2,000 used K-cups that they will recycle after you send it back. Not sure if management would embrace financing that.
We also have a Nespresso machine and send the pods back for recycling. They provide free prepaid bags which we just drop off at the UPS place.
So the prepaid bags have no carbon footprint, the same as the fuel burned sending them back for recycling? Sounds like a virtue-signaling gimmick. If stuff can't be recycled locally it's probably sent to China where they cherry pick the 5% that can be recycled at profit and dump the rest into the ocean.
I recycle all I can, but it costs so much to transport and recycle materials that it's not really much of an environmental savings.
Coffee makers are a good opportunity to Reduce or Reuse instead of Recycle; reusable kpods, paper filter machines, or even old fashioned percolators (where everything but the grounds are reusable) are all better choices than trying to get people to recycle the pods.
Those things are like using hotel-size shampoo bottles at home.
I was at somebody's house today, and they had cut all their paper napkins in half "to reduce waste." I mentioned that we use cloth napkins for that reason, and they got all vague. Sometimes it seems like people have no ability to reason things out.
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