New Zealanders Love Coffee
Perhaps we’re even addicted to it. If you don’t drink coffee, are you really a Kiwi? We have such a coffee culture that it is part of our tourism industry, now tourists can go on coffee tours. The coffee industry is worth hundreds of billions and our per-capita consumption is in the top 20 in the world. There’s blogs about it. Sheep per capita used to be what our country was famous for, now it is coffee – apparently we have more roasters per capita than anywhere else in the world. Homesick Kiwi’s don’t have to look far in the northern hemisphere to find a barista who trained in New Zealand. It’s time for the pavlova to move aside, our cultural identity extends to the debate on the differences between the New Zealand and Australian flat-white (the ratio of milk to coffee) and who invented it.
Kiwi’s are a dedicated bunch with studies showing that over 50% of Kiwi’s will travel out of their way to get their preferred cup. There’s probably debates in your workplace about what café to take the morning coffee run to. This love comes at a cost however. Take a look around on your way to work tomorrow – how many commuters are clasping takeaway cups of coffee? Where do those cups go?
New Zealand serves 295 million cups of takeaway coffee a year. That’s just over 800 thousand cups per day for a population of 4.8 million.
Australians use 1 billion takeaway cups per year or 2,700,000 cups per day (but their population is 24.6 million and NZ fits into Sydney alone!)
The UK churns through 7 million takeaway coffee cups a day – 2.5 billion a year.
Canada serves 4.9 billion disposable coffee cups a year, which works out to 250 cups, per person, per year.
Statisticians in Germany have worked out that approximately 300,000 cups of coffee are consumed per hour, with a lifecycle of 13 minutes before the cups are thrown out.
From that we have to ask ourselves, how many people are using reusable cups and how many takeaway cups are being recycled appropriately?
Unfortunately, statistics show that only 1% (or less) of takeaway cups are recycled. Buying one cup of coffee in a disposable cup every day creates about 10kg of waste a year. If those facts weren’t daunting enough, Planet Ark has done further calculations. An estimated one billion coffee cups end their life in landfill each year in Australia where they take years to decompose and every 30 seconds another 50,000 head that way. Globally it is believed that 500 billion coffee cups are produced a year, which would wrap the world 1360 times!
Depressing statistics aside, Cupcycle is here with a solution! Everyone has good intentions, but we understand that you can’t always carry a reusable coffee cup and spontaneous coffee trips happen. Cupcycle is based on the concept of ‘upcycling’. Essentially it is creative recycling where waste products are created into products that have a new function, and at a higher value than the original product. Cupcycle is a system that upcycles your disposable coffee cup in it’s entirety and turns it into a construction material that can create wall boards. Instead of ending its life in a rubbish dump, your coffee cup can be reborn – simply by placing it in the Cupcycle collection tubes. This creates what is called a circular economy as once the wall board reaches the end of its life it can return to our manufacturing plant right here in New Zealand and re-enter as raw material once again. The same goes for the collection tubes and shipping boxes, they are all upcycled as new products. Imagine how many exciting products could be made if we could divert the 295 million disposable coffee cups from New Zealand landfills each year!
