How Coffee Pods Disintegrate, Or Don’t
This World Environment Day consider your coffee, our fuel to power so many of us throughout the day. 48 billion coffee pods, which is equivalent to 80% of all pods produced globally, end up in landfill or oceans annually and take up to 500 years to decompose (source: AMI Consulting).
Coffee pods are now a major contributor to waste mountains and pollution, with 60 billion pods produced by big name brands in 2018, and even greater numbers set for 2020. Many of these pods would have been labeled as “eco” due to being eligible for industrial composting or forward recycling.
However, the reality is that waste management facilities do not have the ability to differentiate between “eco” bio-plastic and petroleum-based plastic due to a lack of infrastructure, making it hard to compost all these pods; it often does not happen. The same goes for recycling as this relies on both the consumer to participate and for the recycling process to be in place.
Filmed over a 60 day period, this time-lapse research project compares the degradation of four types of coffee pod including: non-recyclable petroleum-based plastic, industrial compostable bio-based plastic, recyclable aluminium, and waste sugarcane pod. The four pod types were placed in the same tank filled with 15 degrees loamy garden soil intended to replicate garden flower-bed conditions.
Think about your next coffee purchase — where is yours going when you’ve finished with it?
