My office has a big bin for recycling coffee pods (van houtte, keurig…) wondering how they get recycled? Thanks
In: 81
In practice: They end up in the same landfill as everything else being thrown away, but in a way that lets people feel less guilty about disposable single use plastics.
A **lot** of recycling is an outright lie to put the burden of disposal of waste due to manufacturer choices on the consumer and then give the consumer a way to feel better about all this waste.
For a long time these things were shipped to developing countries “for processing”, but it turned out that meant “dumping in unregulated landfills”. As these developing countries clamp down on being used as a dumping ground we’ve seen recycling programs in developing countries scale back and even stop because they don’t have anywhere to send the “recycling”.
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They aren’t. Less than 10% of plastic collected in GTA gets recycled. It’s all smoke and mirrors to detract you from the fact that the only solution to plastic pollution is to consume less plastic.
I use Nexpresso’s recycle system. They provide pre-paid bags to ship used pods back. Hopefully they don’t just toss them in a land fill, I could do that myself.
We use the [kcycle](https://keurigkcycle.com) program at our facility. According to them they separate out the components. The plastic and aluminum get recycled and the grounds become compost.
I can believe the aluminum and grounds are recycled, the plastic as with most plastics are probably tossed or burned in an incinerator, which sucks but unless we trace where they send the plastic we will never know.
In total since 2018 till now we have recycled ~200,000 pods.
Edit: at our facility we have recycled 200,000 pods.
As for the kcycle program I’m not sure on that data.
The generic recycling skeptic comments in here are not helpful.
OP, as long is everyone in the chain from your office to the final recycler is being truthful (see footnote), the pods are recycled simply by someone paying a dedicated program to do so.
Many not-commonly-recycled materials are actually physically recyclable, but something else stops it from happening. Maybe it’s not profitable, requires really specialized equipment, has QC issues, etc. Bespoke recycling programs are able to get around these hurdles because someone is paying them to do so. Nespresso might foot the bill because of the good PR, your office might foot the bill because of some kind of company values thing, etc.
TL;DR – recycling hurdles are sometimes monetary or logistics related, not technical. Bespoke recycling programs provide money to get around these issues.
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Footnote – I added that disclaimer because the chain of trust could break at a few points. Your office could lie to make themselves look good (they actually dump the things in the trash). Whatever provider they send the pods to might be lying about sending the pods to a constructive place (maybe they actually just warehouse everything). The final recycler could lie about how much material they recover (maybe it’s an abysmal rate of recovery).
They get trashed. Can’t recycle them.
Source: Worked at a landfill for three years, we had a dedicated semi truck that did nothing but travel between our recycling facility and the dump all day and night.
I think there is some value to separating the coffee from the plastic. It’s better to compost the grounds than let it rot and slowly bake over years? In that little plastic coffin.
If it’s Keurig I think the tops are aluminum foil and that may get recycled.
Glass and aluminum can be recycled in the USA but I agree 90% of plastic gets buried or burned.
Next your going to be surprised that Starbucks recycling all goes to the same bin as the garbage. Was an employee previously and 3 locations I worked did the exact same thing
If you split the pod open and dump the coffee into the compost and the plastic into the bin there’s an 11% chance it gets melted down into recycled plastic products. Since it’s small and light and has paper attached probably less.
Long story short buy compostable pods.
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