Eco-battle brews over Keurig’s coffee pods

One measure of how heated the environmental battle has become over coffee giant Keurig Green Mountain’s $5-billion-a-year plastic pods is how often the company’s opponents use galactic comparisons.

Keurig, the single-serve coffee industry’s leader, produced enough plastic coffee pods last year to circle the Earth more than 10 times, according to one analyst’s estimate, often cited by Keurig’s critics. A YouTube parody depicts aliens that look like Keurig’s plastic pods invading Earth.

The company introduced a new coffee maker in time for Christmas that allowed only its pods, and the battle heated up again. It spawned parodies featuring “Star Wars”-style rebels challenging the “Keurig Empire” by hacking a machine to accept more environmentally friendly pods made by rivals.

More than a dozen coffee manufacturers and other businesses are suing over what they contend are Keurig’s unfair efforts to shut out rival pods.

“We’re under siege,” said Jon Rogers, patriarch of a California-based family coffee company whose soy and corn byproduct-based pods are among those that the new Keurig machine is engineered to reject. “It’s a matter of life and death for me.”

Keurig says the fight boils down to how to make the best cup of coffee, and the company has pledged to come up with a fully recyclable pod of its own by 2020. The throwaway containers, both by Keurig and its competitors, enable coffee drinkers to get a quick cup without messy grounds.

One reason Keurig is locked into plastic now is that nothing else seems to keep the coffee inside the pods fresh, said Monique Oxender, the company’s chief sustainability officer.