By Howard Salkow

Our favourite male actor George Clooney has been the face of Nespresso, the Nestle capsule (pods) coffee company. 

The Nespresso television commercials featured Clooney poking fun at himself as he is rejected by a bevy of beautiful women more interested in the coffee machine and its single-use pods. The ads also leave us with the line … How far would you go for a Nespresso?

But now, there is a more important question surrounding these coffee pods or pads which are pre-packaged ground coffee beans in their own filter: With the coffee packed in a plastic or aluminium package instead of a paper filter, how do we ensure the environment is not damaged?

According to a report in the Northern Star, coffee pods are technically 100% recyclable. But are they being recycled? You might think you're “doing the right thing” by placing your plastic or aluminium pods into your recycling bin – because in most cases the box says you can – but they're ultimately ending up in landfill anyway.

It’s believed Australians are consuming about three million pods a day with more than 1.5 million households in Australia owning a pod machine. This is forecast to double by 2018 with reports the capsule coffee market is on track to overtake the grocery bean market.

It’s an example, says TransPacific Industries (TPI) Queensland recycling manager Hugo Parris, where packaging and marketing technology has outpaced a solution to residual waste. At Material Recovery Facilities – where recycling trucks transport household waste to be sorted – coffee pods are unable to be recycled.

“There's a difference between ‘they (coffee pods) are recyclable’ and ‘they can be recycled’ or ‘they're cost-effective to recycle’,” Mr Parris says.

To compound the challenge, the report adds, the inventor of one of America's most popular coffee capsules, K-Cup – who sold enough capsules in 2013 to circle the earth nearly 11 times – said in March he wished he'd never created them. And he doesn't even use them. 

“No matter what they say about recycling, those things (K-Cups) will never be recyclable,” said John Sylvan. “The plastic is a specialised plastic made of four different layers … I feel bad sometimes that I ever did it.

”In Australia, pods are considered a boutique recycling matter. As manufacturers seek ways to lessen the environmental footprint of their products and look to biodegradable options, the reality is it’s currently more costly to recycle a single coffee pod than it is to dump it in landfill.

There are dozens of brands manufacturing capsules with the range now not limited to coffee and hot chocolate, but also tea and other milk-flavoured pods.

So how do we solve this conundrum?

TerraCycle views itself as the biggest coffee capsule recycler in the world.

Nespresso is one of TerraCycle's founding partners Down Under. Consumers can take their spent capsules to one of the garbage mogul’s 120 collection points at florists and garden centres nationwide or to a Nespresso boutique.

TerraCycle collects the used Nespresso capsules and sends them to a recycling plant in Nowra, in southern New South Wales. The capsules are shredded and recycled into two streams and the residual coffee is separated and sent to an industrial composting facility and the capsules are smelted down for new aluminium products.

It sounds easy enough, but what if you simply enjoy your coffee and dump the pod in the nearest trash can and not give it any more thought.

You also have to wonder how many people have given any consideration to what the pods are doing to the environment. Is this something councils have debated? Are we taking this seriously enough?

So why not leave you with this statistic: It takes up to 500-plus years for a single plastic coffee pod to degrade in the environment and 150-200 years for an aluminium capsule.