The Environmental Impact of Coffee Capsules
Coffee capsules are very convenient and go well with the quick pace of our modern times. They're quick, easy to use, and consistently make a great cup of coffee. However, the environmental impact is a disaster.
Despite efforts to encourage recycling, hundreds of millions of plastic and aluminium pods are being thrown away every year in the UK and globally.
Over 300,000,000 aluminum and plastic coffee capsules are used in the UK alone each year. Most of them (up to 95%) go straight to landfill without a second thought, even with the recycling programs that are put in place.
So despite the efforts to encourage recycling, across the world billions of plastic and aluminium pods are just being thrown away each year. To make this worse, aluminium and plastic capsules can take over 500 years to break down.
Even when it does happen, recycling is at best it's a very difficult process (and sometimes it's completely impossible!) The plastic and aluminium capsules are made of several layers of specialized materials. This is necessary since the brewing process needs the pods to be strong enough to withstand immense heat and pressure.
But Moving Beans is coming to the rescue! Our fully compostable and biodegradable coffee capsules take as little as 5 months to fully break down - the same amount of time as it takes for an orange peel to decompose!
This was a difficult engineering problem to solve, mainly because the coffee capsules need to be made to withstand the heat and pressure from the machine, but also because it's difficult to create a biodegradable plastic that can create a full seal and keep the coffee fresh. But after months of planning, designing and testing, we've done it.
What's more is that they’re completely safe to throw out into your compost or domestic food waste bins.
But we haven't forgotten to the other vital component: great coffee. While the clever scientists on our team went to work on making a sustainable coffee capsules, the coffee connoisseurs went on a mission to source some of the World's best coffees. The result is the World's finest coffees packed in fully-sustainable coffee capsules that always keep the coffee fresh - and you can get it right here from Moving Beans!
You can find out more about us and shop on our online store.
We’re just helping the environment one cup of coffee at a time. We hope you enjoy!
PS - You can read and learn more about the environmental impact of coffee capsules here, here, here, here, and here.
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Landfill is a big issue for the environment, particularly here in the UK where we are so desperately short of spaces to put it. Each year, we chuck out over 26 million tons of household rubbish, more than half of which gets buried underground. Two-thirds of landfill is biodegradable, leading to large quantities of greenhouse gasses being released as it decomposes and thus speeding up global warming.
Jorge Zambrano
September 15, 2018
It’s great that you could design compostable and biodegradable coffee capsules, congratulations, but there is something flawed in the whole Pod concept: how much energy and materials is used to create a single POD, even if it’s as good as yours?