Plastic Free Coffee

One of the biggest problems I faced on this journey was finding plastic free coffee.  I didn't think this would be that difficult but most bags of coffee in the supermarket, even when they look to have a brown paper appearance, turn out to be lined with plastic on the inside or the foil is backed in plastic.  Very few are even recycleable.  Illy (at vast expense) is good as it comes in a metal tin with no plastic.  To avoid the need for coffee pods or filter coffee paper I have this fantastic pour over coffee brewer by Coffee Gator which has no consumables.  It is a lot smoother than a cafetiere.

Instant coffee is a little better as it can come in tins or glass containers, but the lids are all plastic.  Do keep the plastic lids from the tins of Kenco Millicano wholebean instant coffee, Nescafe Azera Intenso or even Aldi's Alcafe Barista Moments though,  as they are great for putting on the top of open food cans (e.g. half-used can of baked beans) before you pop them in the fridge.  Alternatively, Douwe Egberts instant coffee comes in a glass jar with a glass lid.  I think the jars look great and would be good re-purposed for food storage jars as they have the plastic seals.   I have not found anywhere local (a coffee shop or other) that sells coffee loose for refills.  I will keep looking out for this as ultimately even though there are plastic free alternatives it does feel wasteful.   

   

I have just this week found Percol Coffee.  It has the 'Plastic Free Trust Mark' from A Plastic Planet.  The bags are home compostable.  They are new to the market only arriving on our shelves in November 2018.  They come in beans and ground and they taste pretty good too.  All this home compostable packaging though, I am going to have to look into getting a bigger compost bin!

When I did my Costco visit I picked up a very large tin of ground coffee.  It does have a plastic lid but at 1.32kg of coffee it is a lot less plastic than 13 lids on 100g tins with the plastic lids.