Last week, I visited Warner Philips, one of the partners of Tendris, based out of San Francisco. Despite the excellent coffee culture (at least nowadays) in the United States, Tendris USA have their own espresso machine in their offices on 2nd Street. The machine is a Nespresso machine and after having pushed the button I had a short conversation with the office manager about the Nespresso. She absolutely hated it and on top of that was wondering how environmentally friendly the Nespresso cups were. Her reasoning was that due to all the packaging, you could better use normal (filter) coffee.
Fast forward to this morning. I was on the plane, having a conversation with a director for sustainable product design for Alcan, a large manufacturer of packaging products. He suggested that while the Nespresso cups do increase the amount of packaging, using them was still a lot better than using normal coffee when looking at the total lifecycle (either in an espresso machine, or when using to make filter coffee). Apparently to produce one Nespresso cup, one only needs 6 grams of coffee, whereas for a cup of coffee from an regular espresso machine, you need 10 to 12 grams of coffee. Quite a difference and exactly this difference is what makes up for the packaging in the Nespresso cups, according to the German guy from Alcan.
