Every day hundreds of thousands of Britons put their coffee cup into a recycling bin. They’re wrong – those cups aren’t recyclable, and the UK throws away 2.5bn of them a year. It must stop, writes Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
One chilly morning last March, exactly the sort of morning when a warming cafe latte could seem appealing, I took to the streets of London in a double-decker bus adorned with 10,000 empty takeaway coffee cups. It might have looked like a piece of dodgy conceptual art, but it was actually designed to illustrate the vast volume of takeout cups we throw away daily in the UK.
My bus didn’t represent all of them, though 10,000 is the number of cups the UK gets through in just two minutes. The British, like the Americans and Italians, are a nation of caffeine addicts. Walk down any busy street and you’ll see people clutching coffee-filled cardboard vessels. That adds up to a huge number of used cups; more than seven million a day, or 2.5 billion a year. The sorry truth is, next to none of them are recycled, and the even sorrier fact is that no one’s taking responsibility for that, least of all the big coffee retailers who have created this takeout trash mountain.
During my War on Waste battle, I’ve looked at all kinds of issues related to food waste, such as the heinous “cosmetic standards” applied to supermarket fruit and veg that lead to mountains of perfectly good produce being dumped.
The coffee cup crisis is somehow even more glaring – a wanton waste going on right under our noses. Most consumers wrongly assume that paper cups are a “green” choice. It’s an assumption coffee companies are happy not to challenge. They know differently, but they’re keeping that to themselves. They’re not going to tell conscientious consumers that putting a used coffee cup in a recycling bin is pointless. But it is.
The takeout cups that are the stock-in-trade of High Street coffee giants such as Starbucks, Caffe Nero and Costa are currently almost impossible to recycle. To make these cups waterproof, the card is fused with polyethylene, a material that cannot be separated out again in a standard recycling mill. What’s more, the cups are not even made from recycled material in the first place – the way they are designed means one thin seam of card inside the cup comes into contact with the hot drink, so they have to be made from virgin paper pulp.
And of course, they have very brief lives; just the time it takes to down a macchiato. The millions of coffee cups we use every day are, in effect, virgin materials with a single use, thrown almost immediately into the bin; a horrendous waste, with a hefty carbon footprint.
To read the full story, visit http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36882799.