The Reusable Cup Debate

Or why you have no excuse not to own one.

I released a podcast a few weeks ago and in that I talked a little bit about the amount of waste we create with our daily dose of coffee or tea or whatever it is we have to drink that day and since I released that podcast the amount of people I see on a daily basis with their takeaway cups still astounds me and I wanted to talk a little bit about it — get a dialogue going.

First things first — where are you reading this? Do you have a coffee in hand and is it in a takeaway cup? If the answer is yes then it is most likely not recyclable, despite what you may think. The traditional takeaway cup contains plastic, the benefit being; it allows it to keep the no doubt delicious drink within the confines of the cup. That cup in your hand is one of 2.5 billion disposable cups and of that 2.5 billion, only .25% can be recycled.

I’m not going to sit on the fence here — there is no excuse to use these cups, and it is a real shame that we haven’t done enough to counter this. But whose responsibility is it ultimately? The governments? Chains like Starbucks, Costa and Caffe Nero? Us? Combination of all three I’d say, but real change happens when companies take charge — they are the real policy changers. The government have recently blocked a change that would see disposable cups gone by 2023 which is ridiculous also known as the latte levy. It should be backed and the government should have done more to back it.

So what do we have so far? If you bring in your own reusable cup you will most likely receive a discount off of that drink which is usually 25p and now Pret a Manger offer 50p, so thats one incentive. If we look on Amazon we can see hundreds of reusable cups that can be bought — some as cheap as £3 and they go up, but if you took a middle of the ground cup say at £10 — it would take you 20 trips to make the money back off of it. Most of us will have a coffee a couple a times a week so this is more than doable. The cups are great too! You have companies like KeepCup who have risen in prominence, they make reusable cups that are suitable for all barista machines.

What is your excuse?

It takes one large company to incite change, and they don’t have to offer reusable cups, they could change their current cups to these ones by Vegwareor Biopac or Enviropac or the several other companies offering solutions more suitable to tackling the problem we have. Instead of ending in landfill they are given back to the land. The cups can also be branded: problem solved.

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The bag charge that was introduced a few years back has shown that consumers can and will adapt, sometimes they just need that little push to make the change.

Will you step up?