First published on CSRWire, June 7, 2013

I have a coffee jones.  I follow all things caffeinated and java-like and I am crestfallen and furious that the newest coffee trend is to use single-serve pods.

We now understand waste, water usage, manufacturing, mining, freight transport, and packaging and their effects on the world. It seems madness to develop a new product line that increases all of the above.

This new product line decidedly lowers a company’s CSR profile. And the companies with strong CSR profiles who develop these products? What are they thinking?

There is nothing positive about replacing a perfectly fine product with one that uses significantly more packaging, freight, waste, manufacturing, plastic, aluminum, and dyes. If individual fresh cups of coffee are desired, coffee in tea-bag-like devices would do the trick and would be fully compostable.

Life Cyle Costs

The companies and the customers who use these products should have to pay for their environmental impacts up front. These pods now represent seven percent of the coffee sold in the U.S. and 20 percent in Europe. The market is growing rapidly, and the pods are piling up in landfills. Some of them are supposedly recyclable, but to do so is time-consuming and messy.

In fact, these pods are rarely recovered. Even if they are recycled, their production and recycling still waste huge amounts of material, energy, and water.

So, let’s add up the environmental costs of this totally unnecessary aluminum mining, manufacturing, production, packaging and transport. Then, we’ll add the landfill cost of these pods and charge customers and companies on a pro rata basis for the packaging.

If we calculated the environmental cost of a cup of coffee in a French press, percolator or drip device vs. the environmental cost