Group: Selena, Mariah, Jillayne, Bharath, Evan
We chose a Keurig machine that uses pre-made coffee pods. We are trying to have more easy-to-make coffee at home. This reduces the amount of money we spend on buying coffee elsewhere, and also to reduce the amount of time we spend making coffee as busy students.
We will redesign this product by turning used coffee grounds from the coffee pods into the packaging for new coffee pods. This will work by having the consumer send back their coffee grounds to the company and the company will then send new coffee pods created by recycling and reusing the coffee grounds.
The materials we use designs out waste and pollution. We will also use as few materials as possible to easily separate the machine for disposal if needed, as well as easily disassemble for repair.
By reusing the coffee grounds and repurposing them to create new coffee pods, this company eliminates waste from their product lifecycle while creating and selling new products in the process. This helps eliminate the percentage of food waste going into landfills and promotes sustainable design.
The circular business model we can use is waste to wealth. This can be done by “purchasing” the spent pods/coffee grounds used by the customer by offering discounts or small monetary incentives for them to send their grounds back to the company. That way, the grounds can be used to make the new pods to send back to the customer.
Our product belongs to the “refurbish/remanufacture” cycle because the coffee grounds are sent back to the manufacturer to make the new product to resell. That is effectively “refurbishing” the spent beans to “remanufacture” the pod. We also have a “hybrid refill/long-lifetime” cycle because the machine itself is meant to last for a long time, where we are also refilling the necessary ingredients on a subscription-like basis to keep the machine making new coffee.