Australian coffee industry supplier Capsule Pack has unveiled an innovative solution to the country’s growing problem with used coffee capsules.
Australians consume three million coffee capsules a day, or more than a billion a year, and until now the aluminium and plastic pods used by manufacturers were not biodegradable. The used coffee capsules are creating a significant environmental problem, but Capsule Pack is now able to produce 100 per cent biosourced and 100 per cent biodegradable coffee capsules.
Mark Beattie, Director of Capsule Pack, which packs capsules for the Australian coffee industry and its sister company, Coffee Roasters Australia, had investigated markets around the world looking for a solution to the environmental dilemma for years, before settling on a biodegradable capsule that also delivers a high-quality extraction.
Mr Beattie said their new BioCap capsules are a composite material obtained by transforming cereal plants to replace petro-chemical based plastics. As a result, they conform to the most internationally recongnised and strictest standard for Biodegradable packaging waste, European standard EN13432.
“We spent a lot of time in testing the performance of the biodegradable capsule. Our new biodegradable capsules have the same if not better performance versus the current capsules, but the difference is that they take days to compost, rather than hundreds of years.
“The plastic and aluminium capsules could take anywhere between 150 years to 500 years to break down, but our new capsules will biodegrade within 180 days,’’ said Mr Beattie.
“Our capsules are the first locally produced biodegradable pods that are available to Australia’s coffee industry.”
Mr Beattie said Capsule Pack was now marketing the new capsules to coffee roasters throughout Australia.
He said he hoped the coffee industry would race to embrace the new BioCap capsules providing a long term viable solution to the single serve capsule market.
“Hopefully the industry in Australia will adopt these new capsules, and the environmental problems will be significantly reduced. We are still working and innovating on our other forms of packaging and are on track to achieving a complete home compostable solution in 2017. This is the holy grail of packaging solutions and something we are very passionate about. So far we can offer a complete retail packed capsule solution that is 80% certified biodegradable. A big aim and achievement for us was to remove plastic from the capsules, and our capsules are now 100% biosourced material that can be used to make compost and give back to the environment. Plastic capsules will sit around in landfill for hundreds of years and offer nothing useful back to the environment. We also wanted to remove aluminium from the capsule, to ensure the extraction of coffee from the capsule does not come into contact with any aluminum. The negative health effects from of aluminium in water is well documented. We now get customers contacting and thanking us that could never use capsules before due to these health concerns.”
Mr Beattie said more than 1.5 million households and businesses in Australia owned a pod machine and that number was forecast to double by 2018. Nationally there have been reports the capsule coffee market is on track to overtake the grocery bean market within the next three years.
“When we launched Capsule Pack, our aim has never been to service the major retailers. We got into this business as we believed we could offer a solution to the specialty coffee industry so they could compete against the multinationals, major retailers and flood of imported capsules.
“We are a big supporter of the Australian specialty coffee industry through Coffee Roasters Australia, so we decided to set up Capsule Pack three years ago and offer a service based on quality of the coffee, and flexibility of packing, whilst being conscious of the environment.
“We had to make some sacrifices in the beginning on the environment, as there were no adequate solutions available, but, had been working from day one to achieve an environmentally conscious solution as we knew, that ultimately is what the market would prefer and is needed for the long-term viability of the single serve capsule market.”
