Archive

Frugal Cups are made from recycled paperboard. You’ll be surprised how unusual this is. Almost without exception, paper cups, even those claiming to be recyclable or compostable, are made from virgin paperboard. That’s the freshly manufactured bright clean sheets that manufacturers coat with plastics and chemicals to ensure that they’re waterproof. Even if the paperboard […]

We continually come into contact with small businesses and start-ups who are desperate to do the right thing by the environment, whether it’s cutting out single-use plastics or using recyclable raw materials. How can we help them? At a recent event, where I had been asked to talk on ‘Tackling the Plastic Challenge’, a delegate […]

It feels like stating the obvious, but putting special bins in coffee shops is not going to reduce paper coffee cup waste. People use paper coffee cups when they want a take away coffee. Take away. The clue’s in the name. They’ll buy a coffee, leave the coffee shop, go to work, hop on a train, wander […]

Let’s debunk the myths behind bespoke collection systems. There are a number of different initiatives running on the same principle; using a specialist bin to dispose of used coffee cups. These can be found in-store at certain coffee chains and on certain city streets, following a ‘tip, flip & stack’ instruction, the cups are then collected and […]

It’s an issue that’s actually quite tricky to unpick. Quite understandably, many retailers and manufacturers don’t want to come clean about the proportion of their cups that gets recycled. Most of the time, they quietly rely on the word ‘paper’ being more environmentally-friendly than the word ‘plastic’. ‘Paper cups’ sounds just as benign as the […]

After creating a solution to the coffee cup issue, we have decided to join The Paper Cup Recovery and Recycling Group. The PCRRG is made up of pioneering organisations from across the paper cup supply chain, including: paper cup manufacturers, retailers, recycling and waste management companies and paper re-processors. Fellow members include coffee retailers Starbucks, Costa, Caffè […]