Our coffee 'want' is becoming a wicked problem

O

ur need – no, it is probably a want – for caffeine is a problem that has almost taken on the complications and dimensions of a “wicked problem”.

Coffee pods have unintended consequences
 and are piling up around the world.

A wicked problem is one that doesn’t respond to traditional and understood solutions and in fact when they are applied it becomes even more complex and troubling.

Global warming is one of those and the resultant change to the earth’s climate systems it manifests is going to make it increasingly difficult to nurture the coffee bean in traditional growing areas and, beyond that, the comparatively new “coffee pods” are mostly caustic to the environment,

Those behind the coffee pod concept were ensnared by the IBM idea about computers who imagined decades ago that the world would need four or five such machines and now they have proliferated to be essential to daily life.

The coffee pod is similar for it was first thought they would just be used in a few offices, but now most households have them and they are almost as common as opinions, everyone has one.

They bring with them a complication as in most instances they are not recyclable and being single-use they are quickly piling up around the world.

The Atlantic has explored the coffee-pod “explosion” in its story: “A Brewing Problem”.

“I don't have one. They're kind of expensive to use,” John Sylvan told me frankly, of Keurig K-Cups, the single-serve brewing pods that have fundamentally changed the coffee experience in recent years. “Plus it’s not like drip coffee is tough to make.” Which would seem like a pretty banal sentiment, were Sylvan not the inventor of the K-Cup.

“Almost one in three American homes now has a pod-based coffee machine, even though Sylvan never imagined they would be used outside of offices. Last year K-Cups accounted for most of Keurig Green Mountain’s $4.7 billion in revenue—more than five times what the company made five years prior. So even though he gets treated like a minor celebrity when he tells people he founded Keurig, Sylvan has some regrets about selling his share of the company in 1997 for $50,000. But that’s not what really upsets him”