This week Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, announced its decision to ban single-serve coffee pods from government-run buildings.
According to a CNNMoney report, city officials said that they could no longer allow taxpayer money to be spent on products that don’t meet Hamburg’s high sustainability standards. For instance, a city spokesperson said that each pod contains 3 grams of waste for every 6 grams of coffee.
Hamburg’s new guidelines specifically cite Keurig’s K-cups and a similar product from Nestlé.
(Photo courtesy of Amazon.com)The ban is yet another footnote in a string of bad news for single-serve coffee pod manufacturers —particularly for Keurig Green Mountain.
According to The Atlantic, for example, “enough K-cups were sold that if placed from end-to-end, they would circle the globe 10.5 times.”
The fact that Keurig’s K-cups cannot be recycled in most places has contributed to much of the “Kill the K-Cup” backlash.
Additionally unhelpful is that Keurig has promised to make all K-Cups recyclable but not until 2020.
Earlier this month, Keurig also reported that net sales of Keurig machines fell $60.3 million below last year’s, while K-Cup sales also declined by 6 percent in 2015.
Is Hamburg’s ban yet another sign of the slow demise of the single-serve coffee pod?
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