Bird & Wild Coffee's 500g & 1kg Bags are now 100% domestically recyclable

Bird & Wild Coffee's 500g & 1kg Bags are now 100% domestically recyclable - See below photo - showing our new PE 04 domestically recyclable packaging.

This means that the coffee bag, valve and labels are all made of PE 04 and therefore domestically recyclable in the UK.

This applies to 500g and 1kg bags: We still have a few leftover 500g and 1kg non-recyclable coffee bags, so you may not get recyclable coffee bags first time round, but if not very soon. We need to use up the non-recyclable coffee bags or that's a waste as well!

For the recyclable 200g bags: We've had to move launch date to April/May. This is because it is produced abroad and a perfect storm of lack of containers (a lot of containers are stuck in China and America apparently due to covid shipping congestion - who knew?), Covid and Brexit customs delays means that the arrival date of the 200g bags has shifted from February to April.

Aside from our new packaging, why are almost all coffee bags currently non-recyclable?

The combination of metal and plastic laminate makes it very hard to recycle and, much like supermarket wrapping etc, has to be put in the general refuse bin currently.

Unfortunately, this is the same for 99% of coffee brands right now - coffee bag packaging is not recyclable.

Why is this?

Coffee is a fresh product and can degrade and stale much like any food or drink product, think bread, fruit, etc.

For Bird & Wild to be available on the retail shelf, we need to guarantee long shelf times, so that no coffee is wasted by the retailer. It's the reality.

In order to do that, we freshly roast our coffee beans straight into the bag and seal it, so that it's stored in a protected non-porous environment allowing for your fresh coffee to sold by retailers.

This is where the metal-plastic laminate comes in. Oxygen is a killer of coffee freshness, so the environment needs to be completely non-porous.

There's also another factor at play: one-way valves.

When coffee is roasted, it emits gases for up to 72 hours.

If we packed the coffee in a bag and then sealed it up, it would explode because of the excess gas that builds up after roasting. 

So, a coffee one-way valve is required to allow this excess gas to escape, but to ensure that no oxygen to come back in.

As a result, you can enjoy the fresh taste of Bird & Wild Coffee for months after purchasing and it's a reality that, in order to supply customers, we need to have a reasonably long shelf life.

The combination of a one-way valve and the metal-plastic laminate make it very hard to recycle currently unless the entire product is made one material alone.

This is why we are heavily investing in brand new packaging technology exclusively made of recyclable PE4 material.