Everyone knows, or should know, that plastic waste has a very negative impact to the world’s ecosystems. Most of plastic products we use are meant for durability, not biodegradable, being more difficult to recycle and deteriorate, therefore it is mandatory that we reduce its use.
Knowing how harmful it is to the environment a lot of countries have already created laws to prevent and eliminate the consumption of single use plastics such as plastic bags, straws, cotton swabs and disposable coffee capsules. See list of countries plastic bans.

It is about disposable coffee capsules we will talk about today.
Do you know that despite all success that coffee capsules brought to John Sylvan (the one who created them) he regrets his invention? And why? We’ll give you some facts:

– In 2014, the Keurig Greeb Mountain (the company that Sylvan created with Peter Dragone) produced enough capsules to circle the earth more than 10,5 times.

– A person who drinks 2 coffees per day, consumes about 700 capsules in 350 days, which can reach 700g of aluminium, 5,7kg of plastic or 4,2kg of paper.

Do you know that we already have alternatives like reusable capsules? There are a lot of choices, for different coffee machines models. Right now we’re a using reusable/refillable plastic one, but want to try as soon as possible stainless steel capsules, to gradually leave plastic products behind: it’s the best we can do.

You can understand the use of reusable capsules, step by step, in the video below:

As you can see, it’s use is not as instantly easy as normal ones, but it just takes a few more seconds to fill in the capsule. After taking out the coffee, it’s still necessary to remove the coffee sludge and wash the pod, but we know it’s worth it if we think about all the waste we’re preventing and how less harm we’re causing to the environment, right?

Let’s now focus on the most important issue : where to buy? Well, our coffee machine is a Dolce gusto machine and we buy online through GearBest (here are also some sites like Ecoreciclos, Vício de Café, Castro Electrónica, Tomtop, Ebay which sell packs for affordable prices. The coffee we use is an universal grind or the one used espresso machines.

There are several brands to manufacture the stainless steel ones, like Sealpod (twaianese), Tostio (brazilian), MyCoffeeStar (swiss), everyone with capsules compatibles with Dolce Gusto and Nespresso machines. The WayCap (italian) is also an alternative, but only for Nespresso.