Costa Coffee announced on 18 April that it will become the first ever coffee chain in the UK to commit to recycling the same volume of cups it puts onto the market in a bid to tackle the challenge of coffee cup recycling and to stop them ending up in landfill.
The UK coffee shop will recycle up to 500 million coffee cups a year by 2020, the equivalent of its entire yearly sales of takeaway cups and a fifth of the 2.5 billion takeaway coffee cups consumed in the UK each year.
Takeaway coffee cups can be recycled but they must be collected correctly and sent to the right recycling plants. Today’s announcement will see Costa pay to make sure takeaway coffee cups are collected and sent to those paper mills which can recycle them. There are currently 3 UK paper mills (James Cropper, ACE UK and DS Smith*) that can recycle these cups and from today they will move from recycling 14m** cups to 100m this year.
Costa will pay a supplement of £70 to the waste collectors for every tonne of cups collected***. This takes the value of one tonne of cups**** from being worth on average £50 to £120, a 140% increase, making it commercially and financially attractive for waste collectors to put in place the infrastructure and processes to collect, sort and transport coffee cups to recycling plants, meaning fewer cups will end up in landfill. Today’s announcement launches in partnership with five national waste collectors – Veolia, Biffa, Suez, Grundon and First Mile.
Dominic Paul, Managing Director for Costa, said: “Costa is putting its money where its mouth is to find an immediate solution to increasing the volume of takeaway coffee cups being recycled in the UK. It also dispels the myth that coffee cups can’t be recycled!”
“Following today’s announcement up to 100 million cups will be recycled this year alone and if the nation’s other coffee chains sign up, there is no reason why all takeaway cups could not be recycled by as early as 2020.
“At Costa we want to guarantee our customers that if they throw their cup into the right recycling bin it will get recycled, and today’s announcement is a major step towards that happening. We have set our own target to recycle the same volume of takeaway cups we use every year and call on other cup retailers to join and help to build a dynamic market for takeaway coffee cup recycling.”
Commenting on today’s announcement Environment Minister Thérèse Coffey, said:
“Congratulations Costa on taking this significant step to help coffee lovers do the right thing and increase recycling. We all have a responsibility to our environment and this is a significant step by a British business which should dramatically increase the number of disposable coffee cups we recycle in this country.
“We want to help companies become plastic free and through our 25 Year Environment Plan we are putting in place the ambitions to encourage all of us to play our part in ending the scourge of plastic waste in our natural environment.”
Costa can also claim to be the first coffee retailer to put in place a nationwide in-store recycling scheme, accepting any branded paper cup, and to date the firm says it has recycled 14 million cups since February 2017. Costa says this latest announcement will work alongside its ongoing commitments to increase the use of reusable cups, whilst working with a number of designers and cup manufacturers, looking at how to minimalize and eventually eliminate plastic in takeaway cups.
