(Photo Credit: Rio Tinto)Nespresso signed an agreement today with major metal company Rio Tinto to use Aluminium Stewardship Initiative-certified aluminum for their coffee pods. The deal should help Nespresso get closer to the company’s goal of using 100% sustainable aluminum by 2020.
Aluminium Stewardship Initiative (ASI) was created by producers, users, and stakeholders. In 2015, ASI became incorporated as a global multi-stakeholder nonprofit organization that aims to define globally applicable standards for sustainability performance and material chain-of-custody for the aluminum value chain.
Rio Tinto describes ASI as the first of its kind for any industrial metal. “Just like Fair Trade coffee and chocolate, the certification by the Aluminium Stewardship Initiative (ASI) gives the metal an ethical stamp of approval,” according to the metal company. “It’s assessed against strict, independently audited criteria including production, emissions, waste, biodiversity, and human rights.”
For many years Nespresso, an operating unit of the Nestlé Group, worked with partners to set up coffee pod recycling for customers. Almost all customers have access to pod collection facilities now, Rio Tinto said. But the coffee and espresso machine brand also wanted to take a closer look at the way the aluminum itself is produced for their pods.
In 2014, Nespresso committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2020 and backed it up with investments to shrink the company’s environmental footprint.
“While aluminum’s recyclability is a major plus, it takes a large amount of energy to produce the metal — a single smelter can use enough power to light a not-so-small city,” Rio Tinto says. In May, Rio Tinto joined Alcoa, Apple, and the governments of Canada and Quebec to invest $144 million in carbon-free aluminum smelting earlier this year.
Rio Tinto called Nespresso’s commitment to 100% ASI-certified aluminum an important milestone. “The ASI certification provides our customers, like Nespresso, with assurance that our aluminum is produced not just to the highest environmental standards, but social and governance standards too,” the metal company says.
