General Article Minutes on the lips, a lifetime on the tip: the coffee cup waste mountain

Topic Selected: Waste and Recycling
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plastic cups.

Jennifer Ferreira, Coventry University

In the UK we have got used to getting “what we want, when we want it”. So began Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s latest instalment of his War on Waste. And he continued: “the cost of consuming so much stuff is waste… mountains of it”. Last year witnessed his campaign for supermarkets to reduce food waste, and this year he has turned his attention to lack of recycling of coffee cups and the excessive packaging used by some online retailers.

It won’t have escaped anyone’s notice that the number of coffee shops in our towns and cities has grown rapidly over the past decade. As a consequence the number of disposable cups thrown away has exploded to an estimated 2.5 billion a year, or around 5,000 every minute.

The sheer number of cups is clearly staggering, but the real controversy covered by Fearnley-Whittingstall’s programme was that these cups are not being recycled – even though the companies claim to be making efforts to do it....

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