As of July 2023, we are collaborating with First Mile recycling services to provide clients with facilities to recycle paper coffee cups. We were among the first to partner with First Mile on this project.
About 2.5 billion paper cups are used and disposed of annually in the UK. The problem is that most of these go to landfill because they aren’t being recycled correctly. Many people don’t realise these can’t go in standard paper recycling bins because of the polyethylene liner that saves your coffee from wetting the cardboard.
In standard recycling processes removing that lining isn’t possible. It required special tech. This is causing a serious problem in managing how paper coffee cups are collected and prepared for recycling because our current UK practices don’t provide for it. Couple with that, the fact that cups start in a very different location to where they are disposed of, means recycling efficiencies are harder to track too.
Our plan
We will provide paper coffee cup recycling facilities to our customers. We are taking this further by encouraging coffee shops and restaurants in those same business parks and office blocks to subscribe to the service and provide facilities for their customers.
The disposed coffee cups get sent to First Mile, which has the tech to recycle them correctly. The particular advantage of this collaboration is that we are helping to close the loop between the production, use and recycling process by bringing those recycled materials back into the production stage.
By facilitating a circular economy around paper cup recycling, we are also contributing to reducing CO2 emissions. The plastic and the paper derived from recycled paper cups are used again to produce new items. Therefore reducing the consumption of new raw materials and energy and reducing the waste ending up in landfills or our oceans.
In 2002 a report by the One Planet Network showed that a circular economy could reduce global Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHG) by 39%. Our initiative helps towards that goal.
The paper fibre of the cup can be recycled up to seven times, reducing the carbon footprint of new paper materials at an average of 10.2 grams of CO2e by as much as 54%. Then there’s the polyethylene liner which figures aren’t being tracked as rigorously for, but will have a CO2e reduction when recycled correctly.
The CO2 problem isn’t just in recycling disposable paper cups but awareness that they must be collected separately. If paper cups continue to be sent to landfill or discarded at recycling centres that cannot cater for them, they will continue to contribute to greenhouse gases, contributing 45-49% of emissions. That figure was a huge 10.3 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide between 2010 and 2020.
If you operate a business in the Hampshire and Reading area we want to hear from you! Contact Antoni today!