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One Pod At A Time

  • Jul 13, 2024
  • 2 min read

GREEN-HOUSE 2024 X Nespresso



From Cup to Compost

Coffee is one of the most consumed beverages in the world. The infrastructure built around it, capsules, packaging, grounds, generates waste at a scale that is easy to ignore when you're just making a morning cup. At GREEN-HOUSE 2024, Nespresso brought that reality into focus and showed what a genuinely closed-loop system looks like in practice.



The Experience

Visitors were invited to have a complimentary cup of coffee and, while enjoying it, to follow the full journey of the pod in their hand. How Nespresso's precision consumption system is designed to reduce waste at source. How each aluminium capsule feeds into a local recycling programme. How the coffee grounds that remain are converted into nutrient-rich compost rather than sent to landfill.


Over the should shot behind two participants who are planting bulbs into small pots filled with coffee-ground compost. Between them, on the table lay bowls of materials for the activity and boxes labelled Nespresso on them.
Participants pot their own plants using coffee-ground compost during the Nespresso workshop

It is the kind of information that changes how something tastes, not because the coffee is different, but because you understand what went into making it and what happens after.


Over a shoulder, focusing on a left hand holding a bowl of soil and used coffee grounds with wooden spoons in them, and the right hand holds a spoon that has coffee ground mixed soil in it ang it is being placed into a small planting pot that is semi-filled.
Used coffee grounds get a second life as compost in the Ferticlay planting workshop


The Workshops

Two workshops extended the conversation into hands-on territory. In collaboration with Chris Leow of The Freestyle Farmer and Jodie Monteiro of Ferticlay, participants learned to handcraft their own pots and to repurpose used coffee grounds into fertiliser. Each person left with an edible plant, a small living reminder that waste, handled well, feeds something new.


Group of attendees seated at a table with Nespresso crates, preparing to start the workshop as the workshop guide engages one of the attendees.
Workshop mentor engaging participants as they gather for a Nespresso-hosted tasting and workshop session at GREEN-HOUSE Festival 2024

There is something worth holding onto in that. Leaving a festival with a plant you grew something in turns an afternoon of learning into a habit worth keeping. For the everyday coffee drinker, this is where the story of your morning cup can go if the right systems exist around it. GREEN-HOUSE is interested in making those systems more visible, and in finding partners who are already building them.


Three people smiling in front of a Nespresso booth with boards explaining how Reuse and Reduce were applied in this workshop and capsule displays
Visitors at the Nespresso booth, capturing a memory in front of Nespresso's recycling and sustainability practice





 
 
 

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