by Tom Gallant
Getting your environmental fix
Many of us depend on takeaway coffee to keep us going while we are out and about; we get our caffeine fix on the move in a convenient way. But this cultural phenomenon comes at a large environmental cost, thanks to the disposable coffee cup. It may come as a surprise (it did to me not long ago) that, despite appearances, the conventional takeaway coffee cup is not readily recyclable. This is because of how they are made, and what of. To prevent water and heat leakage, an inner plastic liner is bonded to the cardboard cup, making them a no-no at standard recycling plants. The facilities that do accept them are few and far between, meaning that currently only a very small proportion of the 2.5 billion takeaway coffee cups used in the UK annually are actually recycled.
Obviously this situation can’t continue, and greater awareness of the problem is spurring some retailers, great and small – from the chains to the independents – to take responsibility. You could call it a ‘coffee revolution’, where collaborations between companies promise to contribute to the creation of a circular economy.
Recyclable cups
Started in Brighton, East Sussex, Cup Neutral is a scheme including local coffee chain Small Batch whereby you can pick up a takeaway coffee and recycle the cup by disposing of it in Cup Neutral bins, located at collaborating cafés. The cups are collected by Paper Round and taken to an appropriate facility (which can deal with the plastic lining), and the process is helped by the lids being white – making them easily detectable by sorting machines, which struggle to ‘see’ black plastic.
And it is not just the independents waking up to their responsibility. For a few years now, Costa Coffee has allowed customers to dispose of their coffee cups in-store, and the bins even accept cups from competing retailers (it has also committed to recycle as many takeaway cups as it sells by this year), in partnership with waste management company Valpak. Last year, the scheme was joined by Caffè Nero, Greggs, McDonald’s and Pret A Manger.
Starbucks, meanwhile, has teamed up with environmental campaigner Hubbub to offer a similar service, and has pledged to make its disposable cups more easily recyclable.
Reusable cups
The schemes mentioned above are affordable for the retailers themselves (they can always pass on the cost to the consumer if necessary) and cover those moments when you have forgotten to take your reusable cup with you. And consumers are definitely warming to the idea that something needs to be done about unsustainable cups. Allegra World Coffee Portal’s ‘Project Café UK 2019’ report showed that 36% of UK consumers would pay more for takeaway coffee if the cups were guaranteed to be recycled, while 64% said discounted coffee was the biggest incentive for taking a reusable cup with them into cafés.
Pret A Manger, Patisserie Valerie and café chain PAUL offer a 50p discount on takeaway coffee purchased in a reusable cup, with Costa Coffee and Starbucks providing a 25p discount, and Greggs 20p; Caffè Nero, meanwhile, gives customers twice as many reward stamps. Taking things even further towards a sustainable coffee culture, in 2018, Boston Tea Party became the first UK coffee chain to stop serving takeaway coffee in disposable cups.
There are many ways of carrying around your brown gold, and as we have seen above there are many ways in which you are rewarded financially, from a discount to a free coffee after a number of purchases. (Take a small bag with you to put the reusable cup in after drinking if you are worried about pesky drips staining your manbag/handbag). Here are five of our favourite reusable cup designs:
-
- rCUP, 227ml/340ml
The rCup bills itself as the world’s first reusable coffee cup made from used takeaway cups. And perhaps surprisingly given this credential, it is dishwasher-safe (as well as BPA-free). The material – a resin made from the paper and plastic of standard disposable cups – keeps coffee warm for an hour; the result of a collaboration between Cornwall-based eco design company ashortwalk and recycling consultancy Nextek. As well as all this green cred, I like the push-close seal on the lid, which allows for drinking from all around it. You can buy it here in a variety of lid and body colour schemes for £11/£12 plus postage. - WAKEcup travel mug, 280ml
This lightweight, good-looking bamboo and steel cup manages to keep your coffee hot for a decent length of time (at least an hour) without being uncomfortable to hold. It has a stainless steel lining and bamboo exterior (rather than the difficult-to-recycle plastic and paper combination in the now-hated, conventional disposable cups) to achieve this, and is about the size of a household mug. Yes, the lid is plastic, but it is free of BPA (a chemical linked to health problems such as infertility which is commonly found in plastic packaging and containers). You can buy it here for £18 plus postage. - Pokito, 475ml
This lightweight pop-up cup stands out from the crowd thanks to its space-saving collapsible design, so it can be stowed away neatly after use; what’s more, it is effectively three cups in one, with the user able to collapse it to either espresso, ‘medio’ or grande size before filling it. The screw lid means it is spill-proof, and another unique feature is the slightly enlarged base, making it ‘tip-proof’ too; it keeps beverages hot for about an hour. Made from recycled BPA-free plastic including thermoplastic elastomer and polypropylene, the company says it is sustainable after 15 uses. You can buy it here for £15 (free postage). - Tefal travel mug, 360ml
Turning to a more familiar household name, Tefal’s travel mug looks and functions similarly to the rCup, with a push-close seal and ‘360-degree drinking’. But owing to its more traditional composition – stainless steel and silicone (again, BPA-free) – it holds in heat for much longer (at least four hours). Like all of the cups I’ve highlighted in this blog, it is leak-proof; amazingly, quite a few on the market are not, and I don’t know why you’d want to use a leaky cup, even if it is environmentally friendly. This one also feels like it would last a lifetime. You can buy it from various retailers listed here for circa £20 plus postage. - Ecoffee cup, 250ml-475ml
Looking more like the traditional takeaway coffee cup than any of the other products featured here, the Ecoffee cup comes in a range of sizes – 250ml, 340ml, 400ml and 475ml – is made from organic bamboo (making it biodegradable) and is free from chemicals including BPA. As well as being eco-friendly, this is a very stylish cup, although its conventional ‘takeaway’ lid design means that, despite being fitted securely, you wouldn’t want to carry it around upside down in your bag. The other slight drawback for me is that – in the name of personalisation, granted – the website makes you buy the cup, lid, sleeve (and other elements) separately. You can buy it here with prices for the cups starting at £8.95 plus postage.
- rCUP, 227ml/340ml
Well-grounded: making the brown stuff green
And what about the best ways to repurpose used coffee grounds and packaging? Below I take a look at several ways our spent caffeine fix is being put to good use.
Fertiliser/compost
Used coffee grounds create a natural fertiliser that, while slightly acidic when used fresh, are rich in plant-friendly nitrogen, calcium
Mushrooms
Many cafés and restaurants actively encourage individuals and companies to collect their spent coffee grounds – with Costa Coffee one of the big-name chains that advertises this free resource. One thing the grounds are being used for is to grow mushrooms. The grounds have to be used within 24 hours (for this time they remain pasteurised following brewing) or frozen for future use. For those wishing to try this at home, there are suppliers, such as Gourmet Woodland Mushrooms, that sell home-growing kits as well as offering advice on how to cultivate mushrooms using coffee.
Fuel
As with so many other areas of waste management, commercial enterprises are waking up to the realisation that where there’s muck, there’s brass – and coffee grounds are no different, being turned by companies such as bio-bean into logs for domestic wood-burning stoves (make sure your stove is a Defra-approved ‘smokeless’ one) and pellets for industrial biomass boilers – in both cases reducing the demand for timber and other fossil fuels. (Bio-bean also makes natural flavourings from the grounds it collects, and promises more innovations are in the pipeline).
Reusing the sacks
Coffee beans are packed and transported in large hessian sacks made from the jute plant (known as burlap in the US), and these can be recycled in any number of ways – from mills that separate the fibres for use as felt and underlay, to gardeners who use them as barriers to prevent weed growth. The ideal would be to return the sacks back to the growers to reuse, but this poses a financial challenge as well as a carbon footprint one (transportation over the long distance from grower to buyer).
Furniture
Some people are thinking further outside the box and turning coffee grounds into furniture. Check out this coffee table from London-based design company Joy Resolve, which it claims is the world’s first item of furniture made from recycled coffee. The table was made in collaboration with Smile Plastics, which uses various waste streams – including coffee – to make decorative panels for the architecture and design industries. So how about drinking a nice cup of coffee from your reusable mug while sat at a table made from used grounds? Lovely.
Compostable/reusable pods
Finally, many of coffee giant Nespresso’s machines are compatible with Halo compostable coffee pods, which are suitable for home composting. The paper-based Halo pods degrade within four weeks, turning into a nutritious fertiliser for soil – unlike some competitors’ eco pods that are made from bio-plastics. Halo’s labels and packaging are also either home-compostable or biodegradable.
Other eco coffee pod brands include Roar Gill, Toast and Blue Goose.
Meanwhile, Evergreen offers refillable stainless steel Nepresso-compatible coffee capsules. The capsules, which also work with other brands such as Dolce Gusto, last forever. The company highlights the statistic that in 2018, more than five billion single-use Nespresso capsules were thrown away, producing more than 72 million kilograms of waste. So if you don’t fancy composting, these are the solution for you.
There really is no excuse now for buying unrecyclable single-use capsules when these options above exist – meaning that we can be conscientious coffee-lovers both at home and on the street.
by Tom Gallant
Getting your environmental fix
Many of us depend on takeaway coffee to keep us going while we are out and about; we get our caffeine fix on the move in a convenient way. But this cultural phenomenon comes at a large environmental cost, thanks to the disposable coffee cup. It may come as a surprise (it did to me not long ago) that, despite appearances, the conventional takeaway coffee cup is not readily recyclable. This is because of how they are made, and what of. To prevent water and heat leakage, an inner plastic liner is bonded to the cardboard cup, making them a no-no at standard recycling plants. The facilities that do accept them are few and far between, meaning that currently only a very small proportion of the 2.5 billion takeaway coffee cups used in the UK annually are actually recycled.
Obviously this situation can’t continue, and greater awareness of the problem is spurring some retailers, great and small – from the chains to the independents – to take responsibility. You could call it a ‘coffee revolution’, where collaborations between companies promise to contribute to the creation of a circular economy.
Recyclable cups
Started in Brighton, East Sussex, Cup Neutral is a scheme including local coffee chain Small Batch whereby you can pick up a takeaway coffee and recycle the cup by disposing of it in Cup Neutral bins, located at collaborating cafés. The cups are collected by Paper Round and taken to an appropriate facility (which can deal with the plastic lining), and the process is helped by the lids being white – making them easily detectable by sorting machines, which struggle to ‘see’ black plastic.
And it is not just the independents waking up to their responsibility. For a few years now, Costa Coffee has allowed customers to dispose of their coffee cups in-store, and the bins even accept cups from competing retailers (it has also committed to recycle as many takeaway cups as it sells by this year), in partnership with waste management company Valpak. Last year, the scheme was joined by Caffè Nero, Greggs, McDonald’s and Pret A Manger.
Starbucks, meanwhile, has teamed up with environmental campaigner Hubbub to offer a similar service, and has pledged to make its disposable cups more easily recyclable.
Reusable cups
The schemes mentioned above are affordable for the retailers themselves (they can always pass on the cost to the consumer if necessary) and cover those moments when you have forgotten to take your reusable cup with you. And consumers are definitely warming to the idea that something needs to be done about unsustainable cups. Allegra World Coffee Portal’s ‘Project Café UK 2019’ report showed that 36% of UK consumers would pay more for takeaway coffee if the cups were guaranteed to be recycled, while 64% said discounted coffee was the biggest incentive for taking a reusable cup with them into cafés.
Pret A Manger, Patisserie Valerie and café chain PAUL offer a 50p discount on takeaway coffee purchased in a reusable cup, with Costa Coffee and Starbucks providing a 25p discount, and Greggs 20p; Caffè Nero, meanwhile, gives customers twice as many reward stamps. Taking things even further towards a sustainable coffee culture, in 2018, Boston Tea Party became the first UK coffee chain to stop serving takeaway coffee in disposable cups.
There are many ways of carrying around your brown gold, and as we have seen above there are many ways in which you are rewarded financially, from a discount to a free coffee after a number of purchases. (Take a small bag with you to put the reusable cup in after drinking if you are worried about pesky drips staining your manbag/handbag). Here are five of our favourite reusable cup designs:
-
- rCUP, 227ml/340ml
The rCup bills itself as the world’s first reusable coffee cup made from used takeaway cups. And perhaps surprisingly given this credential, it is dishwasher-safe (as well as BPA-free). The material – a resin made from the paper and plastic of standard disposable cups – keeps coffee warm for an hour; the result of a collaboration between Cornwall-based eco design company ashortwalk and recycling consultancy Nextek. As well as all this green cred, I like the push-close seal on the lid, which allows for drinking from all around it. You can buy it here in a variety of lid and body colour schemes for £11/£12 plus postage. - WAKEcup travel mug, 280ml
This lightweight, good-looking bamboo and steel cup manages to keep your coffee hot for a decent length of time (at least an hour) without being uncomfortable to hold. It has a stainless steel lining and bamboo exterior (rather than the difficult-to-recycle plastic and paper combination in the now-hated, conventional disposable cups) to achieve this, and is about the size of a household mug. Yes, the lid is plastic, but it is free of BPA (a chemical linked to health problems such as infertility which is commonly found in plastic packaging and containers). You can buy it here for £18 plus postage. - Pokito, 475ml
This lightweight pop-up cup stands out from the crowd thanks to its space-saving collapsible design, so it can be stowed away neatly after use; what’s more, it is effectively three cups in one, with the user able to collapse it to either espresso, ‘medio’ or grande size before filling it. The screw lid means it is spill-proof, and another unique feature is the slightly enlarged base, making it ‘tip-proof’ too; it keeps beverages hot for about an hour. Made from recycled BPA-free plastic including thermoplastic elastomer and polypropylene, the company says it is sustainable after 15 uses. You can buy it here for £15 (free postage). - Tefal travel mug, 360ml
Turning to a more familiar household name, Tefal’s travel mug looks and functions similarly to the rCup, with a push-close seal and ‘360-degree drinking’. But owing to its more traditional composition – stainless steel and silicone (again, BPA-free) – it holds in heat for much longer (at least four hours). Like all of the cups I’ve highlighted in this blog, it is leak-proof; amazingly, quite a few on the market are not, and I don’t know why you’d want to use a leaky cup, even if it is environmentally friendly. This one also feels like it would last a lifetime. You can buy it from various retailers listed here for circa £20 plus postage. - Ecoffee cup, 250ml-475ml
Looking more like the traditional takeaway coffee cup than any of the other products featured here, the Ecoffee cup comes in a range of sizes – 250ml, 340ml, 400ml and 475ml – is made from organic bamboo (making it biodegradable) and is free from chemicals including BPA. As well as being eco-friendly, this is a very stylish cup, although its conventional ‘takeaway’ lid design means that, despite being fitted securely, you wouldn’t want to carry it around upside down in your bag. The other slight drawback for me is that – in the name of personalisation, granted – the website makes you buy the cup, lid, sleeve (and other elements) separately. You can buy it here with prices for the cups starting at £8.95 plus postage.
- rCUP, 227ml/340ml
Well-grounded: making the brown stuff green
And what about the best ways to repurpose used coffee grounds and packaging? Below I take a look at several ways our spent caffeine fix is being put to good use.
Fertiliser/compost
Used coffee grounds create a natural fertiliser that, while slightly acidic when used fresh, are rich in plant-friendly nitrogen, calcium
Mushrooms
Many cafés and restaurants actively encourage individuals and companies to collect their spent coffee grounds – with Costa Coffee one of the big-name chains that advertises this free resource. One thing the grounds are being used for is to grow mushrooms. The grounds have to be used within 24 hours (for this time they remain pasteurised following brewing) or frozen for future use. For those wishing to try this at home, there are suppliers, such as Gourmet Woodland Mushrooms, that sell home-growing kits as well as offering advice on how to cultivate mushrooms using coffee.
Fuel
As with so many other areas of waste management, commercial enterprises are waking up to the realisation that where there’s muck, there’s brass – and coffee grounds are no different, being turned by companies such as bio-bean into logs for domestic wood-burning stoves (make sure your stove is a Defra-approved ‘smokeless’ one) and pellets for industrial biomass boilers – in both cases reducing the demand for timber and other fossil fuels. (Bio-bean also makes natural flavourings from the grounds it collects, and promises more innovations are in the pipeline).
Reusing the sacks
Coffee beans are packed and transported in large hessian sacks made from the jute plant (known as burlap in the US), and these can be recycled in any number of ways – from mills that separate the fibres for use as felt and underlay, to gardeners who use them as barriers to prevent weed growth. The ideal would be to return the sacks back to the growers to reuse, but this poses a financial challenge as well as a carbon footprint one (transportation over the long distance from grower to buyer).
Furniture
Some people are thinking further outside the box and turning coffee grounds into furniture. Check out this coffee table from London-based design company Joy Resolve, which it claims is the world’s first item of furniture made from recycled coffee. The table was made in collaboration with Smile Plastics, which uses various waste streams – including coffee – to make decorative panels for the architecture and design industries. So how about drinking a nice cup of coffee from your reusable mug while sat at a table made from used grounds? Lovely.
Compostable/reusable pods
Finally, many of coffee giant Nespresso’s machines are compatible with Halo compostable coffee pods, which are suitable for home composting. The paper-based Halo pods degrade within four weeks, turning into a nutritious fertiliser for soil – unlike some competitors’ eco pods that are made from bio-plastics. Halo’s labels and packaging are also either home-compostable or biodegradable.
Other eco coffee pod brands include Roar Gill, Toast and Blue Goose.
Meanwhile, Evergreen offers refillable stainless steel Nepresso-compatible coffee capsules. The capsules, which also work with other brands such as Dolce Gusto, last forever. The company highlights the statistic that in 2018, more than five billion single-use Nespresso capsules were thrown away, producing more than 72 million kilograms of waste. So if you don’t fancy composting, these are the solution for you.
There really is no excuse now for buying unrecyclable single-use capsules when these options above exist – meaning that we can be conscientious coffee-lovers both at home and on the street.