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Not long ago, Green Mountain Coffee and its chief executive, Bob Stiller, were hailed as corporate-responsibility pioneers. Green Mountain was the world’s largest buyer of Fair Trade coffee. The company offset the carbon emissions of its energy use and won a “green power” award from EPA. Twice, it topped CR Magazine’s list of the 100 best corporate citizens.

Today, Keurig Green Mountain (KGM), as it is now known, remains a corporate-responsibility standout. But the Vermont-based firm has a dark stain on its reputation. Since acquiring Keurig, the inventor of a single-serve coffee machine and its patented K-Cups, the company has become the driving force behind what critics say is an environmental scourge – the throwaway coffee pods made of plastic and aluminum foil that waste energy and materials, and are all but impossible to recycle.

Meanwhile, Stiller, an ex-hippie who briefly became a billionaire, was forced out of KGM after going on a spending spree with borrowed money, acquiring a 164-foot yacht, a $10m, 7,500-square-foot Palm Beach mansion and a $17.5m Manhattan condo formerly owned by New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Green living, that’s not.

What went wrong with Green Mountain? In a word, success. Its story challenges easy pieties about doing well by doing good. This is a company that has done very well – but only by setting aside, at least for now, the environmental values it once held dear.

Green Mountain shareholders certainly aren’t complaining. Shares of Keurig Green Mountain (NASDAQ:GMCR) have grown 50% in the last year and 548% in five years. Sales have skyrocketed to $4.4bn last year from $492n in 2008. Those Keurig machines and the little plastic cylinders that pop into them have driven that growth, accounting for more than 90% of revenues.