Coffee cup recycling – it’s time for a change | Susie Dalton Vegware’s Susie Dalton comments on the cup recycling issue which has resurfaced following the BBC airing of Hugh’s War on Waste Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s War on Waste recently revealed that 399 out of every 400 coffee cups we use in the UK go to landfill or incineration, despite many of them claiming to be recyclable. Coffee ground recycling is ideal for any organisation serving lots of fresh coffee. Coffee cups are estimated to be the second-largest contributor to litter waste after plastic bottles. Sending our paper cups abroad for recycling is also not an option. Unfortunately, there’s just not much of a market for them, which means soda fountain cups, coffee cups, and those little sippy cups your dentist gives you all end up getting landfilled. Shane Genziuk is founder of Ground to Ground, a social enterprise based in Melbourne, Australia, that educates coffee lovers about the myriad wonders of used coffee grounds and connects them to cafes that bag used grounds for easy pickup.He estimates he’s signed up nearly 1,000 cafes, working in partnership with a liates in London and Austin, Texas. Every year in the UK, 1.8 million tonnes of carbon emissions are generated by the 500,000 tonnes of coffee waste we dispose of. The raw materials, cup production process, transport and end-of-life destination was compared for the three types, with results suggesting that the cup with the plant-based PE coating performed the best, producing 10.2 grams of CO2 equivalent per cup, compared to around 10.4 grams for the standard PE and just over 13 grams for the compostable cup. RecycleMe™ products are ethically manufactured and made from sustainably sourced raw materials. All our coffee is organic (as is our tea, milk and milk alternatives). Coffee cup lids and drinking straws can also be dropped off at stores for recycling. It is estimated Australians use 1 billion disposable coffee cups each year. Once you separate the cup’s components, you can put the filter and coffee grounds in your compost pile. There are also 4,500 new recycling points around the country this year than last, showing a huge improvement in the government’s approach to the issues of single-use products. You can recycle any paper coffee cup in all of our UK shops, but to help reduce single-use packaging we give customers a 50p discount if they have a reusable cup. Attention, eco-minded coffee connoisseurs: If you bought your caffeine fix in a disposable cup this morning, that cup probably won’t get recycled, even if you dutifully chucked it into a green bin. Please see www.simplycups.co.uk. Australians can bring their empty coffee cup to any participating 7-Eleven store for recycling. Not all paper cups are coated in plastic, though the vast majority are. Packaging company DS Smith announced a new solution: they separate the paper fibre from the plastic lining by adding warm water and pressure, leaving the … We also sell our very own reusable (again and again and again) cup to last you years and years. BioPak offers a composting solution for their BioCups and lids made from bioplastics. Companies like Starbucks and Tim Horton’s offer coffee cup recycling, but only at a small portion of their locations. We recycle spent coffee grounds from businesses at every scale: from coffee shops, cafes and restaurants to office blocks, transport hubs, universities and instant coffee factories. Some outlets offer a discount for bringing your own reusable cup. Disposable coffee cups, milk cartons, takeout boxes, and other food packaging has a plastic lining to make sure liquids and oils don’t seep through. They can contaminate the paper and cardboard waste stream with the plastic and any liquid remaining in the cup. Look for the How2Recycle® label on our recyclable K-Cup® pod boxes: this label, coupled with our visual 3-step process above, aims to communicate "recycle right" behavior. And only getting rarer. Disposable coffee cups can no longer be recycled, so these will all be going directly to landfill. Our next-gen lining uses 40% less plastic – making our products genuinely recyclable. An estimate of 600 billion disposable coffee cups are produced worldwide each year, 99.75% of which are dumped in a landfill or the oceans without being recycled. ... Our recycling process. The positive cup. Thanks to improved recycling in coffee stores and a more conscious effort by … The fine folk at Huskee gather coffee husks discarded in the roasting process, and pulverize them before binding … Paper cups can be taken to any of the in-store recycling points that are offered by most major coffee chains including Costa Coffee, Caffè Nero, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Greggs and Pret A Manger. They can also help to keep the unused product fresher by individually packaging portions separately without exposing the entire supply batch to air and light. Lids and bottle tops cannot be recycled as well. Cups don’t need to be taken back to the store they were purchased from - any brand of cup can be recycled in any store. What the Huskeecup does is solve that problem, while also looking at the humble coffee bean as a raw material. In Germany, the collection capacity for Nespresso capsules has been 100% since 1993 – when Nespresso voluntarily licensed its capsules with Der … The cups are pulped and eventually turned into moulded fibre products such as coffee cup holders and egg boxes, completing the circular economy process. Simply Cups has partnered with 7-Eleven to recycle coffee cups. Most coffee cups are made with a cardboard outer layer and a plastic lining and the materials are difficult to separate. It is estimated that Australians use 1 billion disposable coffee cups each year. Choose RecycleMe™ paper cups and find out how you can Cut the Rubbish. There are estimates that fewer than one in 400 cups get sent for recycling. Keep in mind that not all recycling facilities can process the plastic used for coffee pods, so you might need to send your leftover cups to a regional plant. Made from the grounds of 25 cups of coffee, bio-bean claims its coffee logs burn 20% hotter and longer than kiln-dried wood. As a coffee cup, it is given the perfect new life. We collect your waste coffee grounds and take them to bio-bean who produce bio-fuel pellets for powering bio-mass boilers. The aluminum top and plastic pod can be recycled according to your local recycling guidelines. Kaffeeform is a sustainable material made from used coffee grounds and other renewable resources. If we use the Circular Cup as an example; used cups are collected within cafes, separated from general waste and recycling, stacked and sent to a recycling facility. They are then transported to a processing facility that cleans, shreds and compounds the cup with recycled plastic to form a resin. Your classic to-go coffee or soda cup is designed for one-time use, but unfortunately recycling at this point is basically nonexistent in the U.S. That’s because all cups are lined with a thin coating of plastic that can’t be easily separated during the recycling process. There is a cost involved in recycling, but Simply Cups run a programme of cup collections which are recycled into other usable products. How2Recycle® is an industry-wide labeling system that evaluates a product's packaging and assigns the proper recycling instructions for that product. So it is down to businesses to ensure they have a recycling policy and process cups responsibly. But it also saves businesses money, since recycling coffee grounds is cheaper for your company than coffee … Currently, around 2.5 billion disposable cups are used in the UK every year, and only 0.25 per cent of this waste is recycled, due in part to the lack of facilities able to process the mixed material cups made up of paper with a plastic lining. This is due in part to many of the communities they’ve set up shop in not being able to recycle plastic or waxed lined paper cups properly. Paper from RecycleMe™ packaging can be recycled up to seven times, supporting a circular economy. Recycling coffee grounds this way saves 80% CO 2 emissions than if they were sent to landfill, and 70% than if they were sent to anaerobic digestion facility mixed with food waste. While some communities do recycle materials like paper coffee cups, they’re very rare. And only three paper recycling mills in the U.S. can process plastic-coated paper (Source: Stand.earth). There are few recycling facilities that can process this kind of cup. There, the cups were processed and the fiber was sent to a separate location to be used in the making of new Starbucks cups. PS, PP, and LDPE typically are not recycled because these plastic materials are more difficult and expensive to process. Compostable Cups. There, they are compressed and bailed. Only 18 of the largest 100 U.S. cities accept coffee cups in their recycling programs. Single-serve coffee containers can both reduce the time needed to brew coffee and simplify the brewing process by eliminating the need to measure out portions, flavorings, and additives from large bulk containers. Lined with plastic, the paper cup is no longer as simple to recycle as office paper. The product range includes Espresso, Cappuccino, and Latte cups as well as the award-winning Weducer™ Cup for coffee on the go. Starbucks is to pour $10 million (£7m) into creating the world’s first 100 per cent recyclable and compostable disposable coffee cup. Cups can also be taken to ACE UK carton recycling bring banks. “To recycle or Not to Recycle” is a big question when it comes to plastic recycling. Green Your Cup – The World’s First Recyclable Coffee Cup. Go Green – The greenest choice is to bring along your own reusable cup. Even though some coffee chains say that they have largely recyclable cups, the evidence presented was that most cups were not sent for recycling. What have we achieved so far. According to Jay Hunsberger, VP of sales for North America at Sustana, the Wisconsin mill, the project aimed to “demonstrate that a coffee cup can be turned back into a coffee cup.” Can You Recycle Used Coffee Cups? How to Recycle Paper Cups. Open menu. 100% organic coffee. We know, this is a shocking figure but it is also the reason why Flavia, who moved from Argentina to Melbourne in 20 The truth is that unfortunately even if you think you are doing the right thing and throwing your cup in with the mixed recycling – once the load reaches the MRF for the recycling process the coffee cups will be manually taken out as they are deemed as contamination. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. At its coffee recycling factory in Cambridgeshire, it processes thousands of tonnes of coffee waste into coffee logs. The truth about coffee cup recycling. 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