Aluminum, Plastic, and Coffee Grounds: This is the Coffee Capsule Recycling Process Thanks to Arecafé

More and more homes and offices are acquiring one of those small machines that prepare coffee from a single-dose capsule. These coffee makers have become very popular as they eliminate the need to make an entire pot of coffee, however small, when living alone or when there are few people in the household and everyone has breakfast at different times. However, this new way of making coffee has generated a new type of waste: the capsules containing the coffee. Did you know they can be recycled? Indeed, made of aluminum or plastic, coffee capsules constitute a new type of increasingly numerous waste. Many users throw them away without knowing that they can be recycled. Some also toss them into the yellow bin as just another container. For this reason, Urbaser, the company managing the Western Costa del Sol Environmental Complex located in Casares, and Arecafé, the Alliance of 24 coffee-producing companies for the Recycling of Coffee Capsules, signed an agreement in March last year to recover and recycle the capsules that citizens throw into the gray or yellow containers. As a result of this agreement, the Association of Municipalities of the Western Costa del Sol has recovered 3,900 kilograms of coffee capsules at the Casares Environmental Complex, since March 2024. The president of the Association, Manuel Cardeña, states that "the results are lower than the estimates that had been made," but they consider this data positive "as we understand that citizens are recycling the capsules at specific collection points that Arecafé has established in supermarkets and other locations and that are directly transferred to recycling companies." By periods, in 2024, 1,020 kilograms of coffee capsules were recovered and in 2025, 2,880 kilograms have already been reached, which is not an insignificant figure. The ideal way to recycle them correctly is to deposit them at specific collection points throughout the country distributed by the manufacturers themselves. In the province of Málaga, there are numerous stores, local clean points, and shopping centers where these capsules can be deposited for recycling, as well as in all supermarkets of the Mercadona chain. To find out the nearest one, you can visit the website www.lascapsulassereciclan.com which includes a list of more than 7,000 collection points spread throughout Spain and features a search engine by localities. However, there are still many people who throw them in the trash or in the yellow bin. Before the agreement with Arecafé, these capsules ended up in the landfill as filler material since there were no specific managers for this type of waste. But following the agreement, the Costa del Sol Environmental Complex collaborates in the collection of these capsules for recycling, a very difficult task due to their small size. The agreement with the company provides that Arecafé manages the collections and final treatment of the coffee capsule waste classified and recovered at the Complex to achieve their recycling, at no cost to the Association. Arecafé not only collects the capsules but also takes them to two specific recycling plants where they are given a new life. At the recycling plants, the capsules are processed as follows: first, they are crushed to separate the coffee remains and then sorted according to their material. Aluminum can be infinitely recycled, so it is melted and reused to manufacture new materials for the automotive or computing sectors. In turn, the plastic is turned into granules with which products such as flower pots or urban furniture are manufactured. And the coffee grounds are turned into fertilizer, taking advantage of their richness in nutrients for agriculture.