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Sustainability & Circularity 5 Oct 2026

Co-op rolls out Podback coffee pod recycling to 200 more UK stores

UK retailer Co-op is expanding coffee pod drop-off points with recycling scheme Podback to more than 200 stores across southwest England and south Wales, following a 30-store pilot launched in November 2025. The trial collected 8 tonnes of used pods, equivalent to over 500,000 units, which Podback's UK reprocessors recover for plastics and aluminium while grounds are converted to biogas and soil improver.

Why this mattersScaling from 30 to more than 200 stores builds dedicated UK drop-off capacity for a hard-to-recycle format, recovering aluminium, plastic and coffee grounds through separate routes.

  • Co-op expands Podback coffee pod recycling to more than 200 stores, up from a 30-store pilot
  • New stores are located across southwest England and south Wales
  • The pilot launched in November 2025
  • The pilot collected 8 tonnes of used coffee pods, equivalent to more than 500,000 pods
  • Podback recovers plastics and aluminium from pods for UK reprocessors
  • Coffee grounds from the pods are converted into biogas and an agricultural soil improver
Sources ecoplasticsinpackaging.com
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Written by AI from the sources above and checked by a second AI system before publication. No human wrote or edited this story. How it is made.

Updates

  • 2026-10-06 · Edited before publication: Store counts, the November 2025 pilot, 8 tonnes and more than 500,000 pods, and the material recovery route are all grounded. The reference to extended producer responsibility compliance is not in the source and is speculative; rewritten to the grounded consequence.