The Keurig K-Cup's Inventor Says He Feels Bad That He Made It. Here's Why.K-cups are everywhere. And its waste is, too, thanks to the fact that the cups are almost impossible to recycle.

Keurig Green Mountain made$4.7 billionin revenue last year.

Much of that moneycame thanks to K-Cups, the coffee-in-a-pod system invented by cofounder John Sylvan.

The product is everywhere.

And its waste is, too, thanks to the fact that the cups arealmost impossible to recycle.

"I feel bad sometimes that I ever [invented the K-Cup],"Sylvan told James Hamblin of the Atlantic.

Sylvan's creation is a blessing and a curse.

"[Coffee pods are] the poster-child dilemma of the American economy," beverage consultant James Ewelltold Vanessa Rancaño of the East Bay Express. "People want convenience, even if it's not sustainable."

Sylvan knew he had a hit on his hands when hewas figuring outthe pod mechanism back in the '90s.

"It's like a cigarette for coffee, a single-serve delivery mechanism for an addictive substance,"he tells the Atlantic.

But Syvlan, whosold his stakein the company for $50,000 in 1997, doesn't own the machine.

"I don't have one,"he tells the Atlantic. "They're kind of expensive to use ... plus it's not like drip coffee is tough to make."

Yet the mix of ease and addictiveness has made Keurig and its peers massively — and quickly — successful:

• In 2008only 1.8 million coffee pod machineswere sold in the US. In 2013, 11.6 million were sold.
• A2013 poll发现1 3美国人一个单人份咖啡feemaker, either at home or at work.
• If all the K-cups that were sold in 2014 were laid end to end, the Atlanticreports, it would be enough to circle the Earth more than 10 times.

Today, Sylvan's work is very much environmental —he runs ZonBak, a solar company that claims to make the most cost-efficient solar panel in the world.