What if we gave a second life to aluminum coffee capsules ? The proposal comes from the Alliance for Aluminum Caps Recycling (ARCA), which invites consumers to discover the site recycle-capsules.com to find out about collection solutions in each city in France.
The Alliance for the Recycling of Aluminum Capsules was founded in 2019 by Nespresso France, Nestlé France and Jacobs Douwe Egberts France, with the ambition to simplify the sorting process and recycle 100% of the capsules. At a time when sorting is becoming more and more a part of everyday household life, what about aluminum coffee capsules? They are fully recyclable and can have a second life. Created by the Aluminum Caps Recycling Alliance (ARCA), the recycle-capsules.com site specifies the collection solutions available in each city in France. Today, more than 50% of the population can place their aluminum capsules in the sorting bin. This is for example the case of the inhabitants of Paris, Brest, Nantes, Pau, Nice, Lyon, Limoges, Lens and many other cities. The objective of ARCA is to increase the coverage of this means of collection by allowing 75% of French people to use their sorting bin to recycle their aluminum coffee capsules by 2025. ARCA participates in the Metal project, allowing in 2023 50% of the French population to place their aluminum capsules in the sorting bin and to have access to collection points.
Coffee grounds transformed into compost
The sorting bin is the recycling solution used by more than half of French consumers of aluminum coffee capsules (55 %), according to the IFOP study carried out for the Alliance for the Recycling of Aluminum Capsules. There are more than 2,500 collection points in France, including nearly 900 in supermarkets and large stores. Relay points, but also recycling centers, offer to recover aluminum coffee capsules. Aluminum collected and recycled is used to make new objects, and coffee grounds (90% of capsule weight) from this collection is transformed into compost in France for the benefit of French farmers or into biomethane injected into the city gas network. Thanks to recycled aluminum, we save six tonnes of CO2 equivalent and 95% of energy compared to the production of primary aluminum.
