Plastic coffee pods are poisoning YOU and the PLANET.
Why it matters
Why coffee pods are a problem
A coffee capsule is a laminate: a plastic cup, a barrier layer and an aluminium lid, bonded so tightly they cannot be pulled apart again. That bond is what keeps coffee fresh, and it is also what makes the pod impossible to recycle in a normal household bin.
01
0billion+
Made every year.
Coffee pods are manufactured at a rate of roughly 39,000 a minute, almost all of them a plastic cup bonded to an aluminium lid.
Industry estimate
02
0particles / litre
Ending up in your cup.
Microplastic measured in hot retail coffee. Every one of 155 samples tested contained some, and polypropylene, the plastic most capsules are made from, was the most common polymer found.
Al-Mansoori, Harrad and Abdallah, 2025
03
0years
Before one breaks down.
And a pod sold as compostable is not the escape route: it needs an industrial facility, yet 9 in 10 US households have no food waste collection at all.
Industry estimate · BioCycle nationwide survey, 2023
Naturista
Plastic and aluminium pod
Pod sold as compostable
Time to break down
Days
Centuries
Weeks, industrial facility only
Microplastics in the cup
None, no plastic present
Measured in hot coffee
Depends on the plastic used
Works in existing machines
Yes
Yes
Varies by brand
Home compostable
Yes
No
No
Dissolves in water
Yes, completely
No
No
Our mission
Make the sustainable choice the one nobody has to think about.
Most people will not change their morning routine to save the planet. We do not think they should have to. The failure is not that people are careless, it is that the only convenient option was built out of a material that outlives everyone who uses it.
So we did not design a product that asks anyone to give something up. Same machine, same taste, same thirty seconds. The only difference is what is left over, and there is nothing left over.
Near term
Get the material out of the kitchen
Move from a formulation that works on a counter to one a factory can run consistently, at a cost that competes with the plastic shell it replaces.
Medium term
License it rather than hoard it
The companies already making billions of pods a year can switch material faster than any new brand can outsell them. Licensing puts the pod in more hands, sooner, than competing would.
The point
Retire the plastic capsule
Every pod replaced is one laminate shell that never reaches landfill, and one cup of coffee brewed through something that was never plastic to begin with.
We were two students with no laboratory, ordering biopolymers online and casting films on a kitchen counter. Two hundred failures later, one of them held. That is the whole argument: the problem was never that this was impossible, it was that nobody had bothered.
Fifteen of the two hundred casts, in the order they were made.
Where the idea came from
Borrowed from surgery: bioabsorbable implants
Naturista did not start with coffee. It started with a class of materials used inside the human body. Bioabsorbable implants — dissolving screws, pins, meshes and stents — are designed to hold a structure together while tissue heals, then break down into byproducts the body safely absorbs, so no second surgery is needed to take them out.
That is the same problem a coffee pod has, stated differently. The shell has to be rigid and sealed for exactly as long as it is useful, and then it should stop existing. Plastic capsules solve the first half and ignore the second. Surgery solved both decades ago by choosing a material whose disappearance is a designed property rather than an afterthought.
The principle
Strength for a fixed window
A bioabsorbable implant is engineered to hold load for a known period, from months to two years, then hand that load back to healed tissue. A pod needs the same thing compressed into thirty seconds of hot water and pressure.
The translation
No removal step
The point of a dissolving implant is that nobody has to go back in and retrieve it. The point of a dissolving pod is that nobody has to sort, peel, rinse or drive it to an industrial composter.
The material
Polysaccharides, not petroleum
Medicine reaches for polymers that metabolise cleanly. We reached for pullulan, a food grade polysaccharide already used in pill capsules, and asked it to do the structural job instead.
Surgeons stopped asking how to make an implant last forever and started asking how to make it leave on schedule. A coffee pod is a far easier version of that question, and for decades nobody asked it.
Both are made from pullulan. One is shaped to work in the coffee machine you already own. The other skips the machine entirely.
The machine pod
It is the same size and shape as a standard capsule, so it drops into your existing brewer with no adapter and no change to how you make coffee. The shell is built to hold its shape against hot water and pressure for the length of a brew. After that it is just plant material: put it in the garden or the compost bin and it breaks down in days.
1
Load it
Into any standard single serve machine.
2
Brew it
The shell stays intact through the full cycle. The coffee tastes the same.
3
Compost it
No sorting, no peeling off a foil lid, no special facility.
Breaks down in
Days
Microplastics
None
Works in your machine
Yes
Home compostable
Yes
The instant pod
A measured dose of coffee sealed inside a thin pullulan shell. Drop it into hot water and the shell dissolves in seconds, releasing the coffee as it goes. There is no capsule to pull out, no filter, and no machine needed. The packaging becomes part of the drink.
1
Drop it in
One pod into a mug of hot water.
2
Stir
The shell dissolves in seconds and the coffee disperses with it.
3
Nothing left
Nothing to bin, nothing to rinse, nothing to recycle.
Dissolves in
Seconds
Microplastics
None
Machine needed
No
Waste left over
None
The world's first dissolvable, 100% naturally biodegradable coffee pod.
Coffee capsules are made of plastic and aluminium bonded together. They cannot be recycled at home, they shed microplastics into hot coffee, and they sit in landfill for centuries. We replaced the whole shell with one natural material that dissolves in water and breaks down in days.
