The UK Government has targeted reductions of paper cup waste after many businesses adopted single-use paper cups made popular due to Covid restrictions.
Paper cups used by most coffee outlets have a plastic lining that makes them difficult to recycle. Coffee retailers may be ordered to collect and properly recycle paper cups with the new Government crackdown on waste as these cups are not recycled properly.
The audit committee called on the government to set a target to recycle all single-use cups by 2023. It said: “If an effective recycling system is not established… by this date, the government should ban disposable coffee cups.”
Alongside the new ‘Deposit Return Scheme’ (DRC) for plastic bottles, Ministers will look at whether to introduce new orders to force companies to set up recycling bins for single-use cups.
The DRC scheme involves adding a small deposit on top of the price of a product which is refunded when the waste is returned to an in-store collection point.
The scheme is not so new, as countries such as Germany, Denmark, and Sweden have had deposit return schemes in place for years.
Due to Covid restrictions, the Government for public health advised coffee shops that they were no longer able to serve coffees in reusable cups.
Take-away paper cups cannot be included with regular recycling and so most of them end up in landfills. This is all due to the thin plastic coating which allows the liquid to be held inside without being absorbed by the paper cup.
The lids are plastic, but even if they are separated, most consumers will just throw the entire cup away as a whole in the general waste bins.
UK’s landfill sites produce an annual carbon footprint equivalent to over 152,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, similar to what 33,300 cars produce in a year.
Although retailers such as Caffè Nero, Greggs, Costa and Pret A Manger are already part of a recycling paper cup scheme, only 6% of cups were recycled in 2019.
UK coffee cup waste consists of 2.5 billion a year and numbers could rise to 5.9 billion by 2023, that’s a whopping 107,000 tonnes.
The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) announced that recycling targets will be introduced for laminated card by 2026, which will help create ‘on the go’ recycling of single-use cups, in places like train stations to meet eco-targets.
The Government is still deciding on whether to force shops to charge extra costs for disposable cups, similar to the plastic packaging tax which will come into force next year.
