For environmentalists, the single-serving coffee pod is a poster child for the very worst kind of wasteful consumer packaging. But last summer, Nespresso, one of the leading players in this sector, embarked on a plan to reclaim its pods’ reputation as well as the materials used to make these caffeinated conveniences.
Under a new blue-box program developed in partnership with a provincially established non-profit called Circular Materials, residents of London, Ontario, can drop their used pods, which are made with an aluminum mesh and frame, in a special bag that comes in the Nespresso package. Then they put the sack in the blue bin on recycling days. The spent pods are collected and sent to one of three recycling facilities, where the coffee and the casing are separated. The aluminum is compacted and shredded, and then sent to a smelter to be reprocessed.
According to the company, the program has been rolled out in hundreds of communities across Canada. “Nespresso Canada currently pays the entire costs of the capsule recycling program,” a spokesperson says. “This approach does not generate any costs for residents or municipalities.”
This venture, so far, is a small but revealing example of an important shift taking place when it comes to waste diversion. For decades, most Canadian and U.S. municipalities have operated blue-box programs, charging residents and some businesses for the service through taxes or fees. But diversion rates remain stubbornly low, and a lot of contaminated material that gets tossed in blue bins finds its way to landfills.
All of the same accelerants we saw in the climate change debate, we’re seeing take hold now with plastic pollution.
– Rick Smith, executive director, Canadian Climate Institute
The “extended producer responsibility” (EPR) model, popular in much of Europe, places the financial burden squarely in the laps of producers. The thinking is that the industries affected will be motivated to find or develop new end markets or reduce packaging to avoid landfill fees.
The producer-pays model propels innovation
Early this year, Quebec producers and packagers formally assumed responsibility for waste gathered from municipal blue-box programs – the latest Canadian jurisdiction to shift its recycling services to EPR.
Ontario is in the midst of its own EPR transition, setting up “producer responsibility organizations” to manage different portions of the blue-box waste streams.
Sarah King, who heads Greenpeace Canada’s oceans and plastics campaign, points out that Recycle B.C., the oldest and most highly regarded EPR program in North America, has built an encouraging track record. Created in 2014 by the province’s Ministry of Environment, the not-for-profit reported that for 2023, 43% of plastics were sold to end markets, while the agency has established a partnership with GFL, the waste-management giant, to invest in new recycling infrastructure and technology.
EPR, King says, “can have really positive impacts in terms of eliminating problematic materials and formats.” Yet, she offers up cautions: “Unfortunately, what we’ve seen is that it’s really focused on transferring collection and recycling [away from municipalities] as opposed to reducing overall waste generation. It’s not a replacement for eliminating or banning certain types of plastics or materials.”
The transformation of high-profile recycling programs coincides with a boom in research and development and business innovation when it comes to waste materials. Herewith, some notable case studies.
1. Building in reverse through deconstruction
Construction and demolition waste remains a black box in the recycling world, as is true of much of the so-called IC&I (industrial, commercial and institutional) waste stream, of which only about 12% is diverted from landfill in Ontario, according to the Council of the Great Lakes Region. The United States, in turn, generates 600 million tonnes of construction and demolition debris annually, about a quarter of which goes to landfill. The rest, such as scrap metal, is diverted.
Meredith Moore, an interior designer originally from New York, belongs to a growing movement within the contracting business. Her Toronto firm, Ouroboros, provides “deconstruction” services to renovators, essentially salvaging and reselling materials that normally end up in industrial waste bins: old studs, asphalt shingles, flooring and so on. The firm grew out of a home reno she and her partner completed during the pandemic and was inspired, in part, by the sight of so many overflowing bins in front of homes getting makeovers, she says. “I was just pretty much blown away by the amount of really wonderful materials that were being tossed out.”
“Deconstruction is basically building a home in reverse,” Moore explains. “The last things that you’re putting in are going to be your baseboards, kitchen, appliances. All of that gets salvaged. Then we go on to the flooring, and that gets salvaged. Once we get to the drywall, that goes to recycling partners or gets disposed of. There are still not really any great options for fibreglass insulation for recycling right now. Then, once we get back to the stud walls, we basically work from the top down.” Ouroboros can achieve 90% diversion on most projects.
A growing number of municipal, state and provincial jurisdictions have established deconstruction rules, including places like Seattle, Washington, and San Antonio, Texas, where deconstruction is required or regulated. In Ontario, salvaged lumber – which is often much sturdier than what’s on offer at Home Depot – has to be regraded, per the provincial building code. Initially, that rule was a significant impediment to finding buyers, but Moore developed an approach that allows her to sell salvaged beams and studs to homebuilders.
As for the business model, she says there’s still a cost premium for deconstruction services, even after factoring in revenues from resold materials. But Moore has figured out how to reduce that price differential by providing charitable-donation receipts for salvaged scrap that the homeowner can donate. Under those conditions, “we become, on par, less expensive than demolition.”
2. Stopping plastic pollution from synthetic fabrics
As of January 2025, France became the first country to mandate the installation of microfibre filters in washing machines – a move that will reduce the leaching of microplastics into the water system.
European Union data shows that plastic microfibres in textiles are responsible for 15% to 31% of the 9.5 million tonnes of plastics that end up in the world’s oceans each year. In the United States, according to a 2019 literature review published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, textiles accounted for 6% of all municipal waste in 2014, of which only about 16% was recycled. (A few jurisdictions, like Markham, Ontario, offer or mandate textile recycling.)
A 2024 study by Ocean Diagnostics and the Rainforest Conservation Foundation found that annually about 1,920 tonnes of microfibres find their way into the environment from Canadian laundry activities, with almost 400 tonnes released into the air via dryers, with the balance in treated wastewater and biosolids used in farming and forestry.
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Concerns about synthetic fabrics have escalated dramatically in recent years with the advent of fast fashion, as well as the growing popularity of blended materials that include both natural and synthetic fibres that enable clothing to be stretchier. A U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) study released last December estimated that 60% of textiles made today include plastics and cited Environmental Protection Agency studies showing a 50% increase in textile waste between 2000 and 2018.
Some brands – Canada’s Frank and Oak, Patagonia, and Finland’s Pure Waste – now promote either all-natural textiles or products made from post-consumer recycled fabrics. Lululemon last year introduced products made from “enzymatically recycled” polyester. End-of-life diversion, however, has had limited success because clothing and textiles are not allowed in most blue-box programs. Used synthetics that go to landfill or incinerators release greenhouse gases and leachates that shunt microplastics into lakes, rivers and oceans, soil, micro-organisms and, ultimately, human bodies.
While some textile-recycling facilities now deploy hand-held devices that use infrared scanning to identify different types of fabrics, these technologies don’t solve the blended-fabric problem, and, as the GAO report goes on to note, advanced textile-recycling technology is still in its infancy.
A US$1.28-million research study, commissioned by Goodwill and funded by Walmart’s philanthropic arm, seems to support that conclusion. Conducted at four regional textile hubs in the United States and Canada serving 28 Goodwill divisions, the two-year pilot concluded that 60% of the material studied – cottons, blends and polyster – could be reprocessed with existing recycling technologies.
While such findings are encouraging, regulations to mandate microfibre filters in washing machines will likely be more effective at reducing microplastic pollution well before clothing is thrown out. Just don’t dump your accumulated lint down the drain after collecting it. Better yet, experts say: dry your clothes on a line.
3. Recovering EV battery materials through ‘direct recycling’
The surge in sales of electric vehicles in recent years foreshadows a similar surge in EV battery recycling as all those vehicles begin to reach the end of their lives. Battery metals and components like cathodes and anodes can then be reprocessed and cycled back into battery production.
But the traditional means for salvaging these materials rely on high heat (smelting), chemicals or water, producing by-products that harm the environment, including greenhouse gases, acid leachate and an abundance of sodium sulfate, a cast-off compound that’s harmful in high concentrations. For every tonne of battery metals, conventional recycling produces 800 kilograms of this salt-like powder, which is difficult to dispose of and has few further commercial uses. Chinese battery recyclers sell it for use in detergent, while North American and European firms pay to dispose of it. “There’s not really an industry for this material,” says Beatrice Browning, a senior recycling analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a global EV supply chain consultancy.
“In the competitive battery industry, the difference between sodium sulfate being a sellable product and a cost centre for disposal is one of the main reasons why battery producers in the U.S. and Europe can’t compete on cost with Chinese battery companies,” says Micha Ben-Naim, a scientist and investor with Boston-based Clean Energy Ventures.
Browning points to the emergence of “direct recycling,” a simplified process for salvaging the various components of a spent battery without shredding the modules. “The direct recycling process’s easy scale-up is expected to generate higher revenue due to higher material recovery and few processing steps,” a team of researchers from India, Singapore and France concluded in a study released last year.
Several start-ups are now working in this emerging market, Browning says: Kyburz, a Swiss EV company with a battery recycling division; Princeton NuEnergy, which has raised US$55 million and is now building a commercial-scale plant in South Carolina; and Ascend Elements, which has raised more than US$700 million in recent years and signed a 2023 deal to supply recycled battery materials to Honda. Clean Energy Ventures, meanwhile, recently led a US$8-million seed round, to be invested in Aepnus Technologies, a California firm commercializing a sodium sulfate recycling technology.
Unlike conventional methods, direct recycling doesn’t produce the black mass that’s used to produce cathodes. That’s an advantage, because it eliminates the need to ship black mass to Asia for reprocessing, Browning notes. “The aim is to try and localize the whole supply chain.”
4. Replacing plastics with new biodegradable materials
At some point this year, the UN member nations will resume a long-delayed negotiation over the implementation of a global treaty, adopted in 2022, to end plastics pollution. Even without the environmental hostility and climate denialism of the Trump administration, the goal remains elusive.
For decades, plastic packaging has been the Achilles heel of the recycling industry. With a few exceptions (e.g., fleece made from recycled bottles), plastic is stubbornly resistant to circular applications for a range of familiar reasons: the proliferation of single-use plastics, inadequate sorting, mixed and contaminated feedstock, and simply the skyrocketing quantity of plastic packaging.
Veteran plastics researcher Rick Smith, executive director of the Canadian Climate Institute, says that new recycling technology won’t alter this narrative; rather, he predicts, the trajectory of plastics use will yield to rapidly emerging insights about the health impacts. Microplastics “are widely distributed throughout the natural environment, with evidence of harm at multiple levels of biological organization,” the authors of a wide-ranging literature review published last year in Science observed. “They are pervasive in food and drink and have been detected throughout the human body, with emerging evidence of negative effects.”
Smith points out that the microplastics debate today is where the climate crisis discourse was a generation ago. “All of the same accelerants we saw in the climate change debate – the increasing awareness that climate change is not some sort of notional concern for our grandchildren, but a proximate threat to human security in the here and now – we’re seeing take hold now, just in the last year, with plastic pollution. For a plastics company, there’s no way you’re going to explain away the horrible, increasing scientific evidence that small plastic particles have penetrated every human body on Earth.”
Those revelations, he predicts, “will drive incredible new solutions in terms of non-toxic new materials and truly biodegradable plastic-type materials. That’s happening quickly, but we’re not there yet.”
John Lorinc is a journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture.
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