How Nespresso & Keurig Spend Millions Trying To Solve Coffee Pod Waste | World Wide Waste

Coffee companies produce around 50 billion pods in just a single year and most of them go to landfills. Now, one Canadian company claims to have created a compostable coffee pod made using the leftovers of roasted beans. Club Coffee eliminated the plastics from single-serve pods their customers complained about. So what we were really solving for here was their guilt Brands like Keurig and Nespresso have spent tens of millions to make their pods more recyclable but only a handful of facilities can process them. Are these efforts enough to keep pods out of the dump? And we asked a coffee YouTuber what's the most convenient way to brew with the least amount of waste? You can have great cups of coffee without spending too much time in the thought process. Americans love coffee. They drink almost as much of it as bottled water and one in four daily drinkers uses coffee pods like this K-cup. Keurig got its start in the late marketing its no-mess product. A standard K-cup is made up of four parts. A cup made from polypropylene plastic, an aluminum lid, coffee grounds, and a paper filter that holds the coffee. Each component is technically recyclable but by the time you take them apart and clean them it's already made a mess. Not so convenient anymore. It took Club Coffee two years and three separate manufacturers to develop the PurePod 100 which is suitable for industrial composting. You can't just bury these in your backyard but we'll get to that a bit later. Club Coffee in Ontario, Canada has been roasting beans for their house label and other coffee brands for over 100 years. So I like to think of us as the little guys behind the big guys. We produce for some of the biggest brands and some of the biggest retailers in North America. Claudio Gamitti, the head of innovation at Club Coffee, is an industry veteran. He helped launch the PurePod 100 in 2016. It was an idea that was already percolating in my head, sorry for the pun. That idea is to transform the leftovers from roasting beans into compostable plastic resin. Coffee beans are encased in a husk or chaff that gives the raw beans a greenish color. It falls off during roasting. The chaff, now brownish after cooking, heads to competitive green technologies or CGT, a company that develops plant-based resin pellets to replace plastic. It's estimated that for every ton of coffee produced there's up to half a ton of chaff left over. For the most part that ends up in landfill. Even though chaff is biodegradable, as it breaks down in landfills it releases planet warming methane. This facility makes the resin for the holds the compostable coffee pod together. Roughly a quarter of the ring is made up of coffee chaff. The recipe has three ingredients, the chaff, some plant-based resin made here, and this white stuff. The company says it's a compostable biopolymer but wouldn't tell us what it's made of. The conveyor belts carry material to a hopper that heats the mix before it hits an underwater extruder. And out come coffee colored resin pellets. Technicians test the resin pellets before approving the run of a complete batch. Finally, the pellets get loaded into aluminum lined containers called gaylords. The lining protects the resin from absorbing any more moisture and weakening it. We produce close to 1,300 pounds of pellets per gaylord. These plastic like pellets are what makes the pure pod simpler to compost. There's no separation required, there's no washing or cleanings required. In contrast, Keurig's recycling program has come under scrutiny. You know those numbers on the bottom of your plastic recyclables? K-cups were originally made of plastic number seven. That's the catch-all group of plastics that are nearly impossible to recycle. Many recyclers around the world only take two of the seven kinds of plastic. Plants often reject the other types along with anything that's too dirty and send them to landfills or incinerators. Keurig had a commercial at the time as you need to recycle as it is to enjoy. And I knew based on my own personal research that that wasn't the case. This is Calvin Lacan. He's the lead researcher for the Waste Wiki Project at York University. It's his job to study trash. I jokingly refer to myself as the garbage man when you think of garbage, think of me. He says the size of the pods make them hard for recycling operations to handle. It's too small and nobody wants it, so that's probably the easiest way to describe it. The pod itself will actually fall through the grates, like it's very difficult to capture in a best-case scenario. This new stream of waste infuriated some customers as Keurig gained popularity. The 2014 Kill the K-Cup campaign compared the product to a monster in a horror film. In response to the backlash, Keurig started making pods from plastic number five, which is technically recyclable, but given the limitations of the existing system, it was not and is not being recycled. Environmentalists sued, saying Keurig's recyclability was false advertising. So in 2022, Keurig settled for $10 million. The company now attaches a warning label on any packaging claiming the K-Cups to be recyclable. Kind of a huge cop-out. Even if you live somewhere they can be recycled, the amount of work you have to do to prep the pods for drop-off pretty much ruins the convenience factor. That's one of the reasons the inventor of the K-Cup, John Sylvan, came to regret creating them. And that's what inspired Club Coffee's idea to make compostable pods. The hard ring is made here at Formark, using the biodegradable pellets we saw earlier. Formark spits out over a million of the rings every day. First, they test every batch for moisture when it arrives. Vacuums pull the pellets into an extruder to be heated. This makes the plastic-like material soft and moldable. It's shot into the ring mold with high pressure, 64 at a time. When cool enough, they fall off the ring mold. Every one of them travels through this optical scanner to identify rejects. Now they're ready to put the Club Coffee Pure Pod together. The rings make the trip back to Club Coffee, where hundreds of thousands of pods run through this almost completely automated line every day. A machine sorts them as workers inspect the process. This filter paper will hold the coffee instead of the usual aluminum and plastic. It's made out of polylactic acid, or PLA, which is a corn-based material. The pressing machine pulls filter paper from these large spools. Heated pistons press the filter into the familiar cup shape. Then, the machine fills several cups at a time with a single portion of coffee grounds. The ring holds everything together before a paper top seals in the freshness. The company says that even the ink on its labels is 100% compostable. But here's the thing about the compostable cup. It will only break down at an industrial facility where waste is kept at a higher constant temperature than backyard compost piles can reach. Even large metro areas like New York City don't yet have the capacity to fully compost the pods. Lastly, assembly line workers seal the Pure Pods into bags and cardboard boxes to ship around the world. Though some come in freshness bags like this that can't be recycled or composted. Since launching the new product, Club Coffee has produced over 1 billion of these pods. But that's a drop in the bucket compared to the 50 billion others produced each year. Many brands are delivering sustainable coffee, but what's the point of having sustainable coffee if the packaging is single-use? Keurig took notice of the sentiment and in 2024 are introducing a mail-in recycling program for K-Cups and a new plastic free compostable pod, the K-Round. However, customers will need to buy an entirely new machine to use the new pods. So what about Keurig's top competitor, Nespresso? The Swiss company was actually the first to bring single-serve coffee to the home market in 1986. Nespresso's smaller, espresso-style machines dominate the European market and since launching a full-cup brewer, it started to take Keurig's market share. Nespresso pods are made from aluminum, not plastic. Aluminum is one of the rare materials that can be recycled again and again without losing its physical properties, but the cost of doing so is significant and higher. These days, customers can either send used pods back to Nespresso in prepaid envelopes or drop them off at any of its 250 boutique stores. The company began its European recycling program in 1991, followed with its mail-in options in the U.S. in 2013. Nespresso spends millions every year on recycling, including funding municipalities that don't already have the necessary equipment. We visited Nespresso's recycling operation in New York City in 2019. That year, Nespresso installed a $1.2 million shredding and sorting machine capable of separating the tiniest bits of metal. This means New York City residents can simply drop aluminum pods in their recycling boxes on the curb. The company claims that nearly 35% of its U.S. customers recycle their pods, but that comes with a hefty price tag. In 2022, Nespresso spent almost $90 million on various recycling projects. So when it comes to coffee pods, what's the best option? I think the pure pod is a wonderful innovation. A lot of people don't realize this, but recycling rates are trending down. So I think composting of organics represents a significant opportunity. U.S. recycling rates tumbled to an all-time low of just 5% of all plastics in the past few years. A big reason? Single-use plastics, a category that includes K-cups. So you may be watching this and going, oh my goodness, everything has all this waste. I mean, producing the coffee itself is very wasteful. Lance Hedrick is an award-winning barista turned coffee YouTuber. He's purchased and reviewed hundreds of brewing devices for his channel, and he wants you to know there are many ways to prepare a top-notch cup without creating extra trash. I really enjoy everything that coffee has to offer. But he wasn't always a connoisseur. Growing up, I did drink that Keurig, and it was awful. And going back to it, I can't understand how I was ever able to even stomach it without putting just a ton of milk and sugar in it. Coffee production leaves behind 23 million tons of solid waste every year. That's everything from bean to cup. And that's not even mentioning the huge amount of energy it takes to grow, roast, and ship coffee around the world. The way that you handle your coffee is so much more important when you think about all the waste that's already occurred. So consumers really only control how they get liquid coffee into their mouth. We decided to compare the solid waste leftovers from different ways to drink. So we've got filter drips, pods, and even a couple popular takeout options. Plus, Lance is going to show a couple of his coffee gadgets. We have a French press, which you can get anywhere for quite cheap. If you're a pod person, we have some bad news. You're always going to be left with extra waste for every cup. That's the pod itself. A K-cup comes out of the machine at 25 grams. A full-cup Nespresso Vertuo weighs 22 grams, about the same. And the new kid on the block, Club Coffee's Pure Pod? Wet, that's 26 grams. It's supposed to break down as long as it makes it to an industrial composter. Otherwise, this is landfill. And let's turn back to Lance for his go-to, the V60 pour-over. Unlike the French press, this one uses a paper filter. So the filter looks like this, just kind of a 60 degree. It's called V60 because it's 60 degrees. You're going to take the coffee, dump it right in. So we pour that into our cup. We have a beverage. Delicious. When all is said and done, the amount of waste you have here is whatever's in this paper filter. As long as that's an all-natural paper filter, it will break down within months. At this point, maybe it's just easier to grab a to-go coffee. That's 26 grams for this large and 29 grams for this one. So out of all of these, which should you choose? The French press wins. No paper and any leftovers go right to compost. But if your coffee consumption is more about the caffeine jolt than flavor, then instant coffee may be the best option. And the process of making instant coffee is a lot less wasteful because it is using less coffee to extract more. So the extraction is very, very, very high. Instant coffee. The freeze-dried concentrate leaves nothing at the end. But be warned. The instant coffee is typically made from the rejected coffees whenever sorting is going on. So instant coffee is very low quality, but I would take it over the cup that I get from a K-cup.