Today’s coffee pods have been made of recyclable packaging materials (e.g., plastics and aluminum) to build the path of sustainability by reducing the pod waste and diverting more waste from landfills. Coffee grounds are organic materials that can be composted and become value-added products when they serve as compost to planters. When it comes to an abandoned coffee pod, everything seems adding value to the environment: recyclable plastics, even 100% recyclable aluminum, and compostable coffee grounds, right?
The reality is that those valuable materials cannot end up where they are announced to be. As a whole, the abandoned pod, usually a mixture of plastics and aluminum, cannot be recycled. Most recycling facilities fail to detect such small size, and thus the pod cannot even enter into the recycling stream. Billions of coffee pods end up in landfills, and it will take 150-500 years to break them down.[1] Furthermore, those different recyclable materials in a pod should be separated to be recycled, and coffee grounds have to be separated too to be composted. However, few facilities have the feasible technology to achieve an efficient separation. Failure to efficiently separate out the recyclable elements and unleash their recycling capacity to recycle makes them end up in landfills, rather than recovered materials or nutrient-rich products. Even if the separation technology is feasible, recycled polypropylene (PP) materials may suffer severe quality degradation due to metal contaminants (e.g., colors, residuals from catalysts) and limit the applicability of recycled PP from mixed household waste.[2,3]
Conventional PP plastics coffee pods have come across difficulties in unleashing their recycling potential. How about the iconic Nespresso capsules for which 100% recyclable aluminum is a major packaging component used to protect the freshness of coffee capsules? The answer is disappointing that it is notably challenging to close the loop on aluminum. Only 13% of their Vertuo range capsules were recycled and less than one-third of aluminum was recycled in total, as the CEO claimed.[4] Because the production of Nespresso pods requires a specific aluminum alloy – alloy 8011. Even though the supply of alloy 801 may not be rare,[5] it was found that a lot of transportation and energy will be needed to reprocess and re-manufacture the alloy from the recycled products. To avoid the quality degradation of recycled alloy, “dilution” may have to be done to reserve the alloy quality by mixing the secondarily recycled alloy with the primary aluminum.[6]
Before you leave and “clip off” the blog, how about taking a coffee break and looking at what we can give our used coffee pods a second life (e.g., potato peeler, ball pen, compost into soil) and where their second life evolves?
References
[1] Ferguson, Z.; O’Neill, M. Former Nespresso boss warns coffee pods are killing environment http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-24/former-nespresso-boss-warns-coffee-pods-are-killing-environment/7781810 (accessed Sep 26, 2020).
[2] Eriksen, M. K.; Pivnenko, K.; Olsson, M. E.; Astrup, T. F. Contamination in Plastic Recycling: Influence of Metals on the Quality of Reprocessed Plastic. Waste Manag. 2018, 79, 595–606. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2018.08.007.
[3] Eriksen, M. K.; Christiansen, J. D.; Daugaard, A. E.; Astrup, T. F. Closing the Loop for PET, PE and PP Waste from Households: Influence of Material Properties and Product Design for Plastic Recycling. Waste Manag. 2019, 96, 75–85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2019.07.005.
[4] Sustainability | Protecting the Environment | Nespresso USA https://www.nespresso.com/us/en/sustainability (accessed Sep 26, 2020).
[5] Why doesn’t Nespresso close the loop on aluminium? | News | Eco-Business | Asia Pacific https://www.eco-business.com/news/why-doesnt-nespresso-close-the-loop-on-aluminium/?sw-login=true (accessed Sep 26, 2020).
[6] Paraskevas, D.; Kellens, K.; Dewulf, W.; Duflou, J. R. Closed and Open Loop Recycling of Aluminium: A Life Cycle Assessment Perspective. In 11th Global Conference on Sustainable Materials; 2013.