Capsules for coffee and other hot drinks such as tea or chocolate milk are increasingly popular with consumers. The vast majority of capsules are made of aluminium, a valuable raw material that can be perfectly recycled. This is why Fost Plus partnered with three major companies in the industry - Nespresso, Nestlé and JDE Peet's - to find a sustainable recycling solution. These three major players finance all the costs linked to the collection, sorting and recycling of coffee capsules, as well as the installation of the necessary machines in the sorting centres.
Volumes take off
On 1 January, we launched collection via the blue bag. The announcement attracted a lot of media attention, so people started to offer their beverage capsules to PMD fairly quickly. We also noticed this in the sorting centres. The capsules have a very strong visual presence in the PMD bags and the volumes collected are on the rise.
To sort the relatively small capsules from PMD, our five sorting centres were equipped with an additional eddy current separator at the very beginning of the process. The technology is now fully up to speed, allowing us to recover the vast majority of capsules.
Incidentally, the eddy current separation has also had a positive effect on other small aluminium packaging, which we can now sort out more easily. Just think of the aluminium screw caps of wine and olive oil bottles, the aluminium sealing foil of yoghurt pots or small balls of aluminium foil. They are all recycled together with the coffee capsules.
