How ‘Green’ George’s trendy cof fee pods are damaging the planet
SINCE George Clooney first extolled the virtues of Nespresso a decade ago, the world has gone crazy for coffee machines. Marketed as quicker and easier to use than old-fashioned cafetieres and of better quality than instant coffee, the fashionable gadgets have found their way into millions of homes and workplaces.
Their key ingredient? Sleek, colourful capsules packed with ground coffee. Each pod contains 5-6 g of ground coffee and provides a single espresso-style serving at the push of a button.
Simply pop the pod into the machine, where the device pierces the capsule and forces hot water through the pod, creating a barista-quality brew in seconds.
Sales of these capsules in Britain have risen by 30 per cent in just a year, with more than 500 million sold in 2015.
But their soaring popularity comes at a shocking cost — with billions of the pods ending up in landfill every year worldwide. Made from plastics and aluminium, they can take as long as 500 years to break down. As the machines become a must-have all around the world, the environmental toll is rising — and more worryingly still, recycling may not be the answer.
Experts consider the danger so great that even the former boss of Nespresso has warned the capsules are an environmental ‘disaster’ — and the inventor of America’s best-selling coffee pods now describes them as a ‘terrible mistake’.
Coffee has seen a surge in popularity in Britain. We now drink almost two and a half cups of it for every one of tea — 2.1 billion versus 874million annually. And pods have revolutionised the way we drink it.
The best-known brand is Nestle’s Nespresso, which accounts for around a third of sales in the UK. Today, around 17 per cent of Brits own a pod machine — and many more use them in offices across the country.
A large part of their success is down to clever marketing — particularly the use of Hollywood heart-throb Clooney, described by Nestle as a ‘brand ambassador’ and the frontman for slick adverts using the slogan: ‘Nespresso. What else?’
How the 55-year-old actor’s role as the face of Nespresso fits in with his status as a high-profile green campaigner — he appeared on the cover of the first ‘Green’ issue of Vanity Fair, owned two electric cars and has spoken out about global warming — is not quite clear.
The former ER star’s endorsement, for which he was reportedly paid £30 million, has given Nespresso a lustre of glamour, sophistication and aspiration.
All of which has gone down a treat with the (whisper it) smug middleclass consumers who take as much pleasure in bragging about their coffee as they do in drinking it.
Clooney’s endorsement, and the other marketing surrounding Nespresso, has been so successful that capsule sales are about to overtake roast and ground coffee.
LAST year, Britons bought £137.5 million worth of capsules, according to The Grocer magazine — a 30 per cent rise on the previous 12 months. In the same period, sales of ground and roast coffee rose just 2.5 per cent to £167million. Industry insiders estimate 15 billion are sold globally — enough to circle the world 15 times when laid end-to-end.
While customers are urged to recycle the pods, the vast majority don’t. The result is that billions of aluminium, foil and plastic cases are ending up in landfill sites.
Tellingly, the manufacturers won’t say how many are recycled. However, an industry insider says the figure is as low as 5 per cent.
Nespresso insists its capsules — made entirely from aluminium, with about 1g of the metal in each pod — are ‘infinitely recyclable’. This is true, but only makes a difference if the capsules are actually recycled.
With the majority of coffee drinkers just throwing their used pods away, however, the environmental cost of extracting more aluminium ore from mines is huge. There’s no shortage of raw aluminium in the world, but turning the ore into metal is so energy-intensive that power plants are built just to supply the aluminium industry.
Recycling aluminium, on the other hand, uses only 5 per cent of the energy needed to make it from ore. So why aren’t more pods recycled?
One major hindrance is that it’s nowhere near as easy as recycling paper or plastic waste.
Most local councils won’t accept coffee pods in their green bins, so customers have to go out of their way to dispose of them ethically. Nestle offers to pick up used Nespresso capsules from your doorstep. Customers can also take them to a Nespresso ‘boutique’ or a High Street collection point.
But in a world where people are too busy to use a traditional cafetiere, it raises the question of how many will actually make the effort to arrange a doorstep collection or take used capsules to the shops?
Tassimo’s capsules, made from plastic and foil, are even harder to recycle. Again, many councils only recycle plastic bottles, so customers have to take pods to one of 268 ‘drop-off points’ in the UK.
That’s fine if one happens to be within walking distance. But take a car and the fuel used to drive to the recycling plant outweighs the environmental benefits of recycling the plastic. And 268 drop-off points is a relatively small number. If you live in Cleethorpes, the nearest is in Lincoln, a round trip of nearly 60 miles. Hereford’s closest drop-off point is Cheltenham, a round trip of 70 miles.
The result? In all likelihood, the pods will still be clogging landfills for many years to come.
That knowledge weighs heavily on Jean-Paul Gaillard’s mind. The CEO of Nespresso from 1988 to 1997, he is now one of the most outspoken critics of capsule coffee — and says that even effective recycling can’t solve the problem. ‘Packing 5g of coffee into something not biodegradable is nonsense,’ he says. ‘It would be like selling all the water in the world in tiny bottles. ‘Recycling doesn’t work. I put together the first recycling system for Nespresso. After a few months I commissioned an analysis from a major Swiss company and it showed recycling anything smaller than a can of Coke doesn’t make sense, particularly when it is dirty.’ He adds: ‘You need to use energy to transport them, to burn off the varnish, to shred the capsules, to wash them, to dry them, and then to smelt them. ‘The more you recycle, the more you pollute. You can forget it. ‘It is a disaster — people shouldn’t sacrifice the environment for the sake of a convenient cup of coffee.’
GAILLARd became so frustrated with the environmental waste from pods that he set up a rival business making biodegradable capsules, called the Ethical Coffee Company. Its pods are made from plant fibres that, although tough enough to work in Nespresso machines, break down within six months of being composted. They cost around 30p each — the same as the aluminium capsules. (Ethical pods are available from cofico.co.uk).
Gaillard is not the only former coffee man to go cold on capsules. Last year, American entrepreneur John Sylvan — who developed singleserve capsules for major U.S. brand Keurig in the Nineties — announced he no longer uses them because of the harm they cause to the planet.
Environmentalists loathe them, too. ‘There are ways we can get our caffeine fix without adding to landfill or the rubbish swirling round our oceans,’ says Mike Childs, of Friends of the Earth.
‘One-off packaging creates huge amounts of unnecessary waste. There’s a whopping 3g of packaging for every 6g of coffee, and not all brands are easy to recycle at home.’
Fiona Nicholls, of Greenpeace, agrees: ‘When we use plastic once and throw it away it can pollute our land and oceans for centuries.
‘Companies need to take responsibility for what they produce, governments need to legislate for change and, of course, all of us need to change our perception of plastic as a throwaway resource.’
Manufacturers insist they do everything they can to reduce the environmental impact of the pods.
Tassimo says the outer packaging for its capsules can be incinerated and turned into electricity, while the plastic pods can be recycled ‘in locations where plastic collection systems are available’.
Nespresso says it has the capacity to recycle 80 per cent of the capsules it makes. Francisco Nogueira, Nespresso UK and Ireland managing director, says: ‘Increasing the number of capsules recycled has been a big focus for Nespresso.
‘Nespresso uses aluminium for its capsules because it not only protects the freshness of the coffee, but it is also infinitely recyclable and can be turned into new materials.’
The company collects used pods each time a new capsule order is delivered. In the UK customers can also return capsules to 6,000 CollectPlus and doddle stores.
But the reluctance of manufacturers to reveal how many capsules are recycled speaks volumes.
Meanwhile, the backlash gathers pace. Hamburg in Germany banned pods from its state-run buildings in February. Other cities and organisations are expected to follow.
Jean-Paul Gaillard says coffee drinkers should vote with their wallets: ‘Consumers should boycott nonbiodegradable capsules, as much as they should boycott all types of packaging which are over-polluting.’
As pod sales soar, and the mountains of plastic and aluminium waste get higher, it’s time for caffeine lovers who care about the environment to wake up and smell the coffee.