Coffee Packaging Film - Incineration, Closed Loops & Recycling

Your coffee sachet film would most sustainably be managed by incineration.

Was what I was told by a local waste processing company when I asked about recycling our coffee packaging film. Surely there's a better solution?

FAFF Coffee will be launching our individually wrapped coffee bags shortly and I HATE that they're wrapped in difficult to recycle plastic and metallised film.

When developing our products - we had two packaging options:

1. Pack individual coffee bags in a zip lock pouch.

By doing this you sacrifice some freshness as pouches will be opened and closed by the consumer as they use the coffee bags. We could choose a fully recyclable (in theory) LDPE pouch. But you can't put these in your domestic recycling. The 'recyclable' pouch can only be recycled with other LDPE - which means plastic bag recycling points at supermarkets.

2. Pack each coffee bag in its own film sachet.

This is fantastic for freshness as the bags are sealed in a sachet in a protective atmosphere straight after the coffee is ground and packed into the coffee bag. You almost get freshly ground coffee every time you open a sachet. But the only film option we had was a traditional MET PET coffee film which is notoriously difficult to recycle.

We decided to launch both packaging types to see what proved to be most popular. And there are also clear market niches for each packaging type.

But I hate that we're already producing so much plastic waste.

Is film the only way?

Single use films clearly has a very important role in preserving quality and ensuring food and drink products arrive with consumers in a safe condition. They're lightweight, flexible and very versatile.

But they're plastic. And as far as I can tell, they're not recycled.

We could have packed our coffee bags into an infinitely recyclable aluminium tin. But that would have added significant cost to an already premium priced product. Plus it would mean a less efficient size for shipping and a lot more packaging material used per unit.

So that isn't an option at the moment.

A more sustainable film?

We're a tiny startup business. There are other films out there that have 'more sustainable' credentials. Fully recyclable LDPE films similar to what the pouch is made from and compostable films. But to access these we need to have relatively huge purchasing power - that we don't have at the moment as a small bootstrapped startup.

But are these options any more sustainable? Or are they just a bandaid or greenwash on what is a fundamental problem with the way we process waste?

Recycling fallacy

Sure if we had the purchasing power we could wrap everything in LDPE film. But honestly - how many people are going to take their empty coffee packaging to a supermarket to recycle? How many will see a recycling symbol and then just throw it in their domestic recycling hoping for the best, where it will most likely end up in incineration anyway?

And what about compostable film? There seems to be a strong argument using renewable feedstocks to manufacture flexible 'bio-plastics' is more sustainable. After all there is a finite amount of oil for manufacturing oil-based plastics. But what do we do with compostable film when it comes to disposing of it? Find me a local authority food waste collection that will accept compostable packaging in it and I'll give you some free coffee bags.

You could argue that the current best outcome for compostable packaging is incineration, after all it will only release the CO2 the feedstock had sequestered before being processed into packaging. But that sounds like a very difficult argument to put to a consumer.

Closed loops

To me, the best course of action is to try to encourage consumers to return their packaging to us to be recycled in the best way possible.

I'd like to build this into our business from the start and offer some incentive for doing so through a loyalty scheme.

But what do I do with the packaging once I've collected it?

I could buy some TerraCycle boxes, fill these up with returned packaging and send them off into the black hole of TerraCycle hoping for the best...

Or can film be turned into something useful? If Circular&Co can turn disposable coffee cups into re-usable coffee cups, surely there is a positive way to turn coffee packaging film into something re-usable and useful?

FAFF is using a minuscule amount of packaging film compared to the coffee industry as a whole. There is a lot of waste film out there and film manufacturers and big coffee companies should be doing more to take responsibility for the waste film they're producing.

We're small, we don't have budget to pay for LCAs or consultants. But we want to do the right thing. We want to bake in packaging sustainability from the start.

But what is the most sustainable solution?