Nespresso Recycling South Africa

While I personally use a stove top espresso machine (Bialetti style), there is no doubt that Nespresso is capturing a huge share of the market, and even enticing non espresso drinkers to buy into the espresso lifestyle. But Nestle don’t care much for the environment and haven’t set up any Nespresso recycling facilities in South Africa. I mean, why would they? What’s the environment, when there are huge profits to be made?

But we’re better than that.

Aluminium can be recycled infinitely, and throwing it away shows complete ignorance. Recycling aluminium can have energy savings of up to 95% compared to the production of primary aluminium. Now since 2000, more than 20 billion Nespresso capsules have been sold across the world. Nestle states a current recycling rate of 50% in Switzerland and Germany, but only 2% in France.

With South African’s not even having the option of dropping their capsules off at any recycling depots, I wonder what percentage of capsules are actually recycled in South Africa? You can recycle them, it just takes some work. You can remove the foil coating, empty the coffee grounds and then add the capsule to your regular recycling bins and drop it off at a recycling depot near you. There is also a device called the Outpresso which removes the coffee grounds from the capsules, and then you can recycle the capsules. These are also available on Ebay if you’re wondering. Here is how they work:

The obvious way to get around all of this is just to use a stove top espresso machine, or an automatic espresso machine. However, Nespresso is really cool and people are buying into it. So they need to know the facts, and we are going to need this planet at some stage or another, surely.

So don’t be one of those people, the ones who go on and on about global warming and how humans are causing all this damage. The ones who talk about the problems, but do nothing to fix them.

Become part of the solution.

Check out www.outpresso.co.za