Are Coffee Pods Sustainable?

I don’t drink much coffee. Maybe I’ll take a cup here or there, but I find that if I have coffee too much after 9am in the morning, I’ll inevitably have trouble sleeping that night.

That’s not to say I receive the benefits of the caffeine hit throughout the day. No, I’m still just as sleepy as ever, just that when it comes time to hit the hay my brain wants to keep doomscrolling and gorging on useless trivia into the wee hours.

I digress. Suffice to say my wife does like coffee. We are lazy and I am cheap (I could never countenance a $4–5 a cup habit). Hence coffee pods.

If you know me (or follow one or another of my blogs) then you may have gleaned along the way that I’m a somewhat of a fan of sustainability and environmental causes. Hence coffee pods represent a kind of cognitive dissonance that some might say is downright hypocritical. However I’m nothing if not pragmatic, and I arrived at the following conclusion in regards to coffee pods: under the right circumstances, they might be sustainable?

Which begs the question: is it actually possible to use coffee pods and still be environmentally responsible? I mean, I know I’m trying to do the right thing but the majority of Nespresso’s customers don’t — by their own account only 29% of their pods are being brought in for recycling by customers.

First, I’d like to do a quick run through of pod machine mechanics (I promise this is relevant). The following crudely drawn diagram illustrates how I believe the process goes:

1. On the right, the blade plate punctures the bottom of the pod, allowing water to flow into and around the pod.
2. The lid and lip of the pod forms a seal, so as the water builds up, pressure increases, pushing the pod towards the perforators.
3. Once sufficient pressure is reached, the perforators are able to puncture the foil and coffee can flow out.

Therefore the design of the pod is an integral part of the process. The grind has to be a size such that they aren’t able to be carried through the perforations and into your coffee. The pod housing and foil seal have to be just-so to provide the amount of resistance necessary to allow the required level of pressure to build up.

Working with the assumption that the OEM pods are bad, let’s first have a look at the aftermarket pods available on the market, and the deficiencies I’ve discovered with them, not just their environmental cred but also the coffee that they produce:

• Pods that are made out of plastic. First, duh, plastic. Second, you need to be 100% sure that the plastic is 100% certified BPA free otherwise it could be leaching chemicals into your coffee.
• Pods that claim to be “biodegradable” are often made out of oxo-degradable plastics, which just means they break down into microplastic particles under commercial composting conditions. This is arguably worse than not being degradable. If you must, at least check that the plastic is home compostable (AS-5810–2010 or equivalent).
• Some aftermarket pods are designed to be deliberately shorter so as to avoid having to be punctured by the blade plate. However, this means they have to be pre-punctured to let the water through, so in order to keep the coffee inside fresh, individual pods are wrapped in their own plastic wrapper. More plastic.
• Reusable pods either lack the foil lid and have built-in perforations, which don’t allow the correct amount of pressure to build up, or provide disposable foil lids that you attach each time you refill the pod, partially negating the reusability benefit. Using your own coffee also requires some experimentation with grind size to ensure that no grounds end up in your output.
• Not even the aluminium aftermarket pods are safe! In the process of pressing out the grounds, I discovered that one of the brands includes a filter behind the lid, presumably to allow a finer grind (for what effect I’m not enough of a coffee snob to know). I assume it’s made out of paper — it has the right texture — but I emailed the company to ask, and received a generic response that would neither confirm nor deny.

So, if none of the alternatives are viable, then what about the OEM pods? Can they somehow, against all odds, be redeemable?

My first rationalisation was that coffee pods are recyclable. They’re made of aluminium, which we’re told is infinitely and cheaply recyclable. I’ve tried a few ways to avail myself of that option, the first being the OutPresso, a gadget (sadly no longer available) that separates the coffee grounds from the aluminium shell, allowing the aluminium to be recycled in the municipal waste collection.

Unfortunately bundling up the loose pod husks proved to be a difficult exercise, as you need a sufficiently large quantity of foil to create a bundle that would survive the ardours of garbage collection. I feared that on their own, the individual pods would simply and literally fall through the cracks, and not be recycled. The grounds themselves were fine. They made their way into my worm farm.

On a brief side note, I amassed a rather large collection of pods to press, and in doing so I took some photographs for my blog. I also uploaded those images to a stock photography website where they could be sold, and in spite of some interest, I didn’t sell anything worth a damn.

The aftermath of one of my Outpresso sessions

Anyway, my second rationalisation was to use Nespresso’s recycling program. They partnered with the Terracycle network to allow drop-off at a number of florists. Unfortunately, the network collection points were few and far between, and the website was outdated, meaning that it was harder than it should’ve been to find a drop-off point. Eventually I was able to make a trip to one of the Nespresso boutiques, and I dropped off a large (nappy) box consisting of probably a thousand or so capsules. Instead of making me put it into the little chute, they literally opened the door right up and let me tip the whole thing in, and even offered to take my box. To their credit, as uncouth as that whole exercise probably seemed, the staff there didn’t bat an eyelid as befits how they should treat someone who, in their estimation, is obviously a very good customer.

At this point, I consider myself to have done due diligence.

Oh, and for the record, I drink instant.