Filling up landfills with K-Cups

Illustration by John W. Tomac

This marketplace article gets me thinking about some powerful what-if questions:

What would happen if we continue consuming K-Cups at the same rate?

What would happen if we took all the K-Cups and put them side by side?

What if we stacked the K-Cups into a tower, how high would they go?

Here is a comprehensive article from the Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/the-abominable-k-cup-coffee-pod-environment-problem/386501/

And then there is this:




A lot of the media buzz around K-Cups is based on this mother jones article, which claims that K-Cups could circle the Earth 10.5 times:

This calculation traces back to Murray Carpenter's book "Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts, and Hooks Us." 

Based on the height alone at 1.75 inches and production of 8.3e+9 K-Cups from Green Mountain along, we get 4,375,000,000 inches, about 9.2 times the circumference of the Earth. 

So this is perfect for a lesson centered on debate. Its time to find out which number is the most reasonable and why.