October has been a busy month for the Podback team. Not only did we take part in the LARAC Conference in Birmingham, and host our second webinar with Letsrecycle.com, but it was also Recycle Week and UK Coffee Week – giving us plenty of opportunities to spread the word about coffee pod recycling to consumers and potential partners.
The programme has already doubled in size during 2023, and now more than one million UK households can now have their used coffee pods collected from the kerbside.
We have welcomed three new local authorities during October, meaning 1,141,000 households across 17 UK local authorities are now able to recycle their used aluminium and plastic coffee pods alongside other household waste and recycling:
East Ayrshire Council became Podback’s first local authority partner in Scotland, and residents’ response to the scheme has been positive, with more than 1,300 households registering for kerbside collections in the first two weeks.
The London Borough of Havering became the second London authority to partner with Podback. And Lancaster City Council has added coffee pods to its weekly kerbside service, with collections starting on 30th October.
Podback is due to launch three further local authority services before the end of November, meaning over 1.3 million households will have access to the service by the end of the year.
Podback now works with more than 20 brands, including Nespresso, NESCAFE Dolce Gusto, Tassimo, L’OR and Aldi, to provide a single scheme for recycling used plastic and aluminium pods. New polling by Podback shows that the majority (57%) of consumers would consider swapping their usual coffee pod brand to one that offered a free recycling service.
Once collected, all coffee pods are reprocessed in the UK at Podback’s reprocessing partners. Used aluminium pods are used in the manufacture of new products - such as beverage cans, and used plastic coffee pods are turned into other plastic items - such as supermarket crates and furniture. The used coffee grounds go through anaerobic digestion to produce a combination of biogas and soil improver.
Podback - Join the growing list of local authorities recycling coffee pods at the kerbside
