Nine billion and one....

Original post:  Mar 11, 2015

I just sat down to write this post with a cup of coffee. I used the Keurig machine. It's a convenient way to get a single cup. You pop in a K-cup and the machine sets out brewing a single mug of java.

I'm not the only one. It's estimated that there will be 9 billion K-cups used over the course of the year. That generates a very large amount of trash.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of these K-cups are not recyclable. John Sylvan, the inventor of the concept explains:

“No matter what they say about recycling, those things will never be recyclable,” Sylvan said. “The plastic is a specialized plastic made of four different layers." The cups are made from plastic #7, a mix that is recyclable in only a handful of cities in Canada. That plastic keeps the coffee inside protected like a nuclear bunker, and it also holds up during the brewing process. A paper prototype failed to accomplish as much.

And because the K-Cup is made of that plastic integrated with a filter, grounds, and plastic foil top, there is no easy way to separate the components for recycling. A Venn diagram would likely have little overlap between people who pay for the ultra-convenience of K-Cups and people who care enough to painstakingly disassemble said cups after use.

Keurig is hard at work on creating a greener version. Older models of the Keurig will also allow for the use of specialized plastic K-cups with metal filters that can be emptied and reused multiple times. Unfortunately, the newer version uses a copyright protection scheme built into the lid which does not allow these methods.

While Sylvan regrets the waste he unwittingly created by inventing this device, he is hard at work on his next idea:

Disruptors, it seems, gonna disrupt. Amazing as it would be if Sylvan were about to capitalize on that and upend the company that once bought him out, he is doing okay either way. When he was bought out of Keurig in 1997, he turned around and bought stock in Green Mountain for $3.20 per share. He sold the stock a couple years ago when it broke $140. He also recently started a new company that sells solar panels, partly to atone for the environmental problem he believes he created. The company is called Zonbak, which means “sun bucket,” in Dutch.

Here is a link to the original article:  How Bad Are K-Cups for the Environment? — The Atlantic

Another article from Mashable:  9 billion Keurig K-Cups likely ended up in landfills last year

Excellence through consistency and repitition

Original post:  December 12, 2011

As I was waiting for my coffee this morning, I began to realize that there are major expectations from seemingly simple devices. We have the single-serve Keurig machines. There are some flavors to choose from, but the basic expectation is the same. This simple device is meant to deliver the same style of coffee each time. This process is repeated dozens of times every day. I would not be surprised to learn that the model in our kitchen makes 1,000 cups or more per year!

Our Operational Excellence team works with the fundamentals of a program called Six Sigma. A business process must be 99.99966% free of defects in order to be considered six sigma. That represents 3.4 defects for every million products. That is an astoundingly small number. It is also extremely difficult to achieve.

One of the ways that you achieve this excellence is through consistency and repetition. Malcolm Gladwell writes about this in his book "Outliers." He estimates that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to reach an expert level of proficiency at most tasks. We expect relentless perfection in every box we open from the first moment of operation to the last minute of its useful life.

It's interesting to work with computers. They do not get tired or bored. They can perform the same task over and over with mind-numbing precision. From a manufacturing perspective, it is generally helpful to have some level of automation that helps to ensure the consistency that consumers expect from their products.

At the same time, we also work in a field that may not always lend itself to a "one size fits all" approach. The wide range of human shapes and sizes can sometimes make it difficult to create standard solutions. This can lead to loose guidelines to help accommodate the outliers that keep medical procedures from reaching that aspirational six sigma goal.

The challenge is for our human minds to be nimble enough to understand where the application of this technology will yield the proper benefits. We have to be brave enough to redirect those efforts if they are not working the way they were intended.