Leading coffee chain launches paper cup recycling program

EDGWARE (Scrap Monster): Costa Coffee- UK’s largest coffee chain, has announced launch of new recycling program for cups in all of its stores by end-January next year. The company had earlier launched pilot recycling scheme in nearly 45 outlets across London and Manchester. The success of the pilot program has inspired the company to expand it into its 2000 plus shops across the UK.

The customers will be encouraged to leave or return disposable coffee cups at the Costa store. The cups thus collected will be stored on a bespoke rack. According to the company, customers could drop disposable cups of other brands as well. The cups will then be collected by Veolia and transported to specialized processing plants where they will be recycled in responsible manner. Upon full implementation, Costa expects to collect nearly 30 million cups of its own per year. The number may be much higher, when cups collected from other brands are taken into account. The studies conducted at Manchester and London outlets last year had indicated that around 40 cups are left in stores every day.

Jason Cotta, managing director of Costa UK and Ireland stated that the new scheme will make it easy for public to recycle their used coffee cups. He called upon company’s own customers and customers who buy coffee elsewhere, to fully co-operate with the scheme so as to help the company become the leader in recycling of disposable coffee cups. He also assured that the partnership will be further widened to include other industry participants.

Coffee cup recycling initiatives have been in full swing in the UK since the release of a recent report which noted that only 400 out of the 3 billion cups used in the UK every year are recycled. According to estimates, nearly 7 million paper hot beverage cups are thrown away in the UK every single day, of which only around 1% is recycled. Manchester alone uses nearly 273,000 disposable cups every day. Following the publication of this report, the government had eased the recycling target for plastic packaging from 57% by 2017 to 49% by 2016. The original target of 57% will be achieved by 2020.

The key issue when it comes to recycling of coffee paper cups is the lamination in them. This lamination with protective plastic makes them hard to recycle using traditional methods. The existing cups could be recycled only in specialist recycling facilities. In addition, the special process employed in such facilities makes use of lot more energy and chemicals than normal paper recycling.

The #1MoreShot campaign launched by environment charity Hubbub had placed large bins shaped like coffee cups on the streets of Manchester. The campaign aims to collect 20,000 cups over a period of three months through December 2016. The collected cups will then be recycled to create 15,000 plastic flower pot holders that will be used in community gardens around Manchester.

Meantime, select Starbucks outlets in the UK has begun testing out a new recyclable coffee cup called Frugalpac, made from recycled paper. As per inspection report by independent authorities, the carbon footprint of a Frugalpac cup is about half that of many of today’s normal paper cups. The plastic liner in these cups is only lightly bonded onto the paper cup, thus making it easy to separate.