Every year, more than 10 billion coffee pods wind up in North American landfills — enough, in fact, to circle the globe more than 10 times over.   That’s due, in large part, to the fact that while Keurig, Tassimo and other brands of single-cup coffee are becoming increasingly popular, most municipal and private recycling systems do not yet recycle the pods they come in — it’s simply too expensive a process to separate the compostable coffee grounds from their recyclable plastic containers.   From an environmental perspective that presents two problems, according to Eugene Ace, cofounder of a unique Toronto startup that’s come up with a solution to the coffee pod dilemma.   “Not only do discarded coffee pods see landfills clogged with plastic, but within the landfill, the coffee grounds trapped inside the pods are not exposed to air, so they end up producing methane — a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide,” said Ace, who cofounded GoJava, a GTA coffee delivery company that recycles its clients’ used coffee pods for free, with Evan Birrman in July 2015.   By partnering with TerraCycle Canada, a Fergus, Ont.-based specialty recycling company, Ace and Birrman have so far been able to divert more than 220,000 of the pods — that’s nearly five tons of coffee grounds and plastic — from local landfills in their first 16 months in business.   “We’re just at the very beginning of what we’re trying to do, but we’re really trying to find a mass-market way to collect these used pods and recycle them,” Ace said, noting that company’s current slate of customers includes more than 200 homes and 100 offices in Toronto, Mississauga, Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Markham and Thornhill.   How GoJava works is this: customers simply place their coffee order for home or office at GoJava.ca, where Ace said they can find a full range of Keurig and Tassimo brands and ancillary products — often at better prices than the grocery store.   All orders of $40 or more are eligible for free next-day delivery courtesy of GoJava’s carbon-neutral delivery van, he added.   Upon delivery, first-time customers receive a special collection bin for their discarded coffee pods along with their coffee order, while repeat clients have their used pods picked up by GoJava for recycling at the same time their newest order is delivered.   “What we’ve tried to create here is a really simple-to-understand and easy-to-use service,” said Ace, a Davisville area resident. “We provide a good variety of products for a good value — including fast delivery and free recycling.”   Once Ace, Birrman and their two employees have transported their clients’ used coffee cartridges back to GoJava’s Scarborough warehouse, the pods are then sorted and aggregated into pallets and shipped off to Terracycle in Fergus.   There, the coffee grounds separated to be either composted or used as fertilizer, while the coffee pods are ground down and recycled into plastic lumber to be used for such products as flooring or park benches.   Lerners LLP is just one of many downtown Toronto offices that make use of GoJava’s coffee delivery and recycling program. The Adelaide Street law firm boasts more than 150 employees, many of whom make use of the office’s single-cup coffee systems, said Karen Hervias, Lerners’ administrative services co-ordinator.   “We go through quite a bit of coffee in a week,” she said, noting that they solicited GoJava’s services about six months ago as part of the firm’s overall waste diversion initiative.   To those ends, Hervias said Lerner also subscribes to GoJava’s Zero Waste Office program, which, for a fee, allows offices to recycle materials that would otherwise end up in the landfill — hard-to-recycle items such as paper coffee cups, foil packaging, electronics, batteries, ink cartridges and general office supplies.   “For us, it’s everything from staplers and calculators, to old laptops and binders,” said Nicole Sullivan, who helped spearhead Lerners’ zero-waste initiative alongside Hervias.   “One of the big things that drew us to (GoJava) was that we were collecting hundreds and hundreds of old binders ... We didn’t want them to end up in the landfill, but we couldn’t find a place where we could send them, either. Then the guys at GoJava mentioned that they teamed up with TerraCycle to deal with binders, so we got on board.”   Thus far, Sullivan said Lerners’ recycling partnership with GoJava has been a successful one she’d “absolutely” recommend to other offices.   “If we were to think of the legal field as an ocean ecosystem, our litigators and support staff would be the great whites of that ecosystem — they’re ferocious, they’re powerful, they get the job done,” she said.   “But, even they realize that, over time, their success depends on the health of the community, so adopting zero waste was just Lerners doing its part and leading by example.”