Do you?

If you believe George Clooney, a day without Nespresso is day without sunshine, without oxygen, without … (insert any hyperbola you want).  But has he ever wondered where all those single-use capsules go?  Maybe they are being compressed, shrunk and crushed until they reach the density of degenerate dwarf star material.  Another rumor has it they are taken back to Switzerland to fill in the caves the Swiss dug to protect themselves during WWII.

Actually they are being swallowed by Victorinox and spitted back out as a special edition of Swiss Army knives called Nespresso Pioneers and they are very cool.

Both Victorinox and Nespresso are Swiss companies located near each other.  Victorinox is a very environmentally conscious company.  “Sustainably-sourced and produced products are at the heart of the Victorinox business model,” says Renee Hourigan, North American Director of Marketing for Victorinox.

So what, you say.  Companies make this claim even if they burn scrap in bonfires instead of sending it to landfills.  That may be true but Victorinox is different.  They are recycling 600 tons of steel from its grinding sludge every year, equivalent to 25% of the steel it uses annually.  So several years ago they started making deep blue handled knives from recycled Nespresso coffee capsules.  Twenty-four recycled Nespresso coffee capsules to be exact, per knife.

11,650 Nespresso Pioneers have were released for sale, (as a value added activity, calculated how many cups of Nespresso George Clooney would have to drink to supply all the aluminum) but you have to go to Switzerland.  They aren’t sold here.  (Email George and see if he can do something about this…)

But that was last year, this year 250 special purple Nespresso Pioneers will be released in the US.  Get ‘em if you can.  They are so cool on so many levels.

In case you’re wondering about Keurig’s K-Cup coffee pods, they were recently banned in Hamburg, Germany, with sales in North America slumping.  Keurig’s promise to make 100% of its pods recyclable by 2020 is ‘too little, too late’ for many German and American households that want to enjoy guilt-free coffee in the morning.