Coffee Cup Conundrum
A coffee cup’s identity crisis…
It’s early in the morning and you stopped off at your local café to pick up a cup of coffee on your way to work. Now you’ve organised your inbox and finished the last dregs of the coffee. On your way to a meeting you throw the cup into the rubbish bin to join a dozen others. While you assume that they are all the same cup and simply decorated with café colours and logos, your daily cup is experiencing a major identity crisis.
What is it made out of? What is it lined with? Can it be recycled? Is it compostable? What type of recyclable? How is it insulated? Paper, or plastic or foam? You’ve finished your morning meeting and the poor cup is still wondering what it is. What lid? What company customisation? What size? Did it come with a cardboard sleeve?
All you, as the consumer, cares about is whether the coffee tastes good and gives you enough caffeine kick to get through the morning. Perhaps you want to be ‘green’ and environmentally friendly and be drinking from a biodegradable or recyclable cup, but your favourite barista doesn’t stock those. Here at Cupcycle we don’t want you to have to sacrifice the quality of your coffee, the distance you have to travel for it, or the cost of it in order to drink from a cup that is better for the environment. Our technology partners, are able to take any paper based disposable coffee cup (and their lids) irrespective of what it identifies as. An all-inclusive service, any coffee cup can go in the Cupcycle collection tubes to become raw materials in the manufacturing of construction materials at a plant in Auckland.
Often we can’t determine the identity of a cup just be looking at it (especially if you’ve haven’t had the caffeine fix yet!) but from knowledge comes awareness.
Biodegradable cups can be broken down my microorganisms (bacteria or fungi) naturally. They are primarily composed of naturally occurring products. Compostable cups decompose when they are placed with decaying biodegradable material and eventually become a nutrient-rich material themselves without releasing harmful toxins. However, degradable coffee cups are oil based and can only be broken down through chemical reactions in anaerobic environments – this results in water, carbon dioxide, biomass or trace elements.
Next we have cups that are singularly or doubly lined with Polyethylene terephthalate/PET, wax-coated or poly-coated which creates a stronger, more durable product – but at the cost of degradability and recyclability. The chemical lining also protects the outside of the cup against weakening from condensation or ‘sweating’. Cups that have an outer sheet of raised ridges are air pocket insulated as there is a layer of air trapped between the two sheets – which insulates without burning hands.
Some cups are made recycled paper, paper from renewable/sustainable sources, without using ‘virgin paper’. The list goes on… As confused as we may all be by the endless options, just remember that any of these paper based cups can, once empty, be placed in a Cupcycle collection tube. There is no need to wash or prepare the cups in any way.
Every minute 370 disposable coffee cups head to landfill in New Zealand – that’s 800,000 a day and 295 million a year. Establish a Cupcycle collection tube at your workplace or favourite café today and give your empty coffee cups a new purpose where identity doesn’t matter!
