{"id":10450,"date":"2017-11-13T09:45:10","date_gmt":"2017-11-13T17:45:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/11\/13\/news-4223\/"},"modified":"2017-11-13T09:45:10","modified_gmt":"2017-11-13T17:45:10","slug":"news-4223","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/11\/13\/news-4223\/","title":{"rendered":"Keurig Coffee Machines Are Hell Devices That Everyone Should Boycott"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Jason Koebler| Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2017 17:44:59 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you spent any time on Twitter this weekend, you may have seen the #boycottKeurig hashtag and noticed that conservatives are filming themselves performatively smashing their Keurig-brand coffee machines. Great!<\/p>\n

The politics of all of this is nuts in a way that everything is nuts these days: Keurig announced it would stop airing ads during Sean Hannity\u2019s Fox News show because Hannity is defending Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore after the Washington Post<\/i> reported that Moore fondled a 14-year-old girl<\/a> when he was 32-years-old. In 2017, taking a stand against the alleged sexual abuse of a minor is somehow seen as politically divisive, and now conservative-coffee-maker-company relations are at an all-time low.<\/p>\n

Keurig\u2019s internal explanation of this move is baffling; its CEO told employees<\/a> that it didn\u2019t want to give \u201cthe appearance of \u2018taking sides,\u2019\u201d which makes this entire blog post much easier to write from a moral point of view. Let me be clear: It shouldn\u2019t be controversial to pull ads from a show that traffics in conspiracy theories, doubts victims of sexual abuse, and furthers the partisan division in this country.<\/p>\n

But also: Keurig manufactures a hell machine that has been disavowed by its inventor<\/a>. It encapsulates the very worst facets of late capitalism and should be boycotted by everyone for reasons that have nothing to do with Hannity. Besides making a product that is horrendous for the environment in its very premise, Keurig was also a pioneer in creating unrepairable, proprietary, single-use hardware and bringing Digital Rights Management and patent law loopholes to coffee machines<\/i>. <\/p>\n

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DRM for coffee! Image: Keurig<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cSustainability is the worst part,\u201d Kyle Wiens, the CEO of iFixit, who pushes electronics companies to make more sustainable devices, told me. \u201cThe pods aren\u2019t recyclable or compostable. The device has more electronics than a laptop and isn\u2019t recyclable. And it has screw-you DRM as a cherry on top.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Absurd Premise of Disposable Coffee Pods<\/b><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re not familiar, Keurig machines are designed to make single servings of coffee. \u201cK-Cups\u201d are single-serving plastic coffee pods that are disposable, not compostable, and, for the most part, not recyclable (Keurig introduced its first recyclable K-Cups<\/a> last year and hopes to make all of its K-Cups recyclable by 2020). <\/p>\n

\u201cIt is taking longer than it took for NASA to put a man on the moon, but in the coming months, the company will begin to sell K-Cups made of material that is easily recycled,\u201d David Gelles wrote in the New York Times<\/a><\/i> prior to their introduction. \u201cRecyclable as they may be, the new cups are not compostable. They are not reusable. And Keurig will still be selling billions of pieces of plastic each year \u2026 to many environmentalists, this makes for a fundamentally irresponsible business model.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roughly 10 billion K-Cups are sold each year; a 2015 story by The Atlantic<\/i><\/a> noted that if you laid out all the K-Cups sold in 2014 end-to-end, it would circle the globe roughly 10.5 times. Most of these are not recyclable because only a handful of K-Cups are recyclable as of this writing.<\/p>\n

Inventor John Sylvan, who left Keurig several years ago, told The Atlantic<\/i><\/a> that Keurigs are \u201ckind of expensive to use\u201d and noted that \u201cno matter what they say about recycling, those things will never be recyclable.\u201d This is because humans are shitty at recycling in general\u2014how many plastic water bottles have you seen end up in trash cans\u2014and most recycled things are actually down cycled, meaning they become something less useful as they go through its end-of-life. <\/p>\n

Keurig machines are not repairable <\/b><\/p>\n

When Wiens and his team tried to take apart a Keurig K55<\/a> last year, they learned it is an unpleasant experience: \u201cIt made us bleed,\u201d Wiens told me. Two years ago, Washington-state coffee machine repairman Joe Young made a viral Facebook post<\/a> in which he wrote \u201cKeurig coffee machines are the bane of my trade.\u201d <\/p>\n

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