Pod defenders say that every bit of wasted grounds has a significant impact, too. Duvoisin says that traditional brewing methods use much more coffee and energy than pods.
The least impactful coffee might actually be instant. However, this analysis was done by a consulting firm for Nestle, which also makes Nescafe instant coffee. Nestle is working to limit the impact of its capsules. According to its website, the company intends to source aluminum responsibly, and promotes recycling in its boutiques and at upscale kitchen retailers. In certain states, consumers can mail back used capsules at no charge via UPS.
How many capsules are recycled? By email, a spokeswoman explained:. True enough. But if most of the aluminum ends up in landfills, that tell us something important about Nespresso — that its recycling efforts, however well-intentioned, are failing. This is a problem any responsible company needs to admit, and address. Add that up to billions of cups of coffee drunk around the world each year and it quickly creates huge increase of the amount of coffee beans that have to be grown, harvested, processed and transported, plus all the energy needed to heat the water when making the cup.
They started chatting about how the composition of water affects the taste of coffee; the discussion led he pair to first co-author a paper in the Journal of Agricultural Food Chemistry and later a book, Water for Coffee.
Last year, Colonna-Dashwood decided to talk to Bath scientists again. He approached Hill at the chemical engineering department and asked him to find out which capsules are actually best: aluminium, plastic or compostable.
The result, says Colonna-Dashwood, is that aluminium capsules. L'Or Tassimo plastic capsules are recyclable , but have to be dropped off at some public drop-off locations around the UK. K-Cups in the US have aluminium tops and are partly recyclable: that is, once you take it apart, you can recycle the aluminium. In Canada, though, K-Cup pods are recyclable as of the end of last year, and the company plans to be making all its pods from polypropylene number five plastic, a widely accepted recyclable material, by the end of , says Keurig spokesperson Katie Gilroy.
Still, trying to motivate consumers to be greener, the company even provides free return bags for the capsules you might buy. Alternatively, it's possible to drop off used capsules at a Nespresso boutique, at one of over 7, collection points including CollectPlus and Doddle locations, says Crosskey, or request a collection from your home. At the moment, the recycling rate is 25 per cent. In , Nespresso ran a six-month pilot recycling project with the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
But even with his company's own aluminium capsules that can be thrown into your regular household recycling bin, coffee from each capsule has to be emptied first. So consumer behaviour plays a role, he says. Still, Colonna-Dashwood thinks that if Nespresso and other companies were all to switch to recyclable aluminium capsules, it may be easier to convince consumers to chuck the waste coffee into the home compost bin and throw the capsule into the recycling one. And that, according to his and Hill's research, would be the best option in terms of the environmental footprint — always with the exception of instant coffee, which fares best in all life-cycle assessment studies.
It's unlikely, though, that Nespresso decides to remove silicon in its capsules. For the company, bespoke recycling comes down to intellectual property: the capsules containing silicon are patented, which originally was used to prevent rivals from making pods that work in Nespresso machines, although a lawsuit put an end to this approach.
And, he adds, even post-lawsuit, the Nespresso machines are made in such a way that Nespresso capsules fit best. You need a lot of transportation and energy. When pods are not recycled properly, ABC says pods can take between to years Nespresso capsules to degrade in a landfill.
The company TerraCycle has tried to incentivize long-distance recycling by offering to for shipping the capsules and pledging to donate to a recycler's chosen charity or school. Alf Hill, professor of chemical engineering at the University of Bath, says that if you consider the entire environmental footprint of our coffee obsession from where and how the bean is grown to the time its grounds are sent off to be recycled, instant coffee is the most environmentally friendly option while traditional espresso actually is the worst.
And surprisingly, "Capsules tend to need less coffee input to make a single drink and so their overall impact can be lower even though we see more waste when we throw them away.
Nespresso capsules are harder to recycle than they look Shutterstock. Nespresso capsules are better for the environment than other coffee options Shutterstock.
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