Costa Coffee's Recycling Revolution

Costa Coffee’s ‘Recycling Revolution’

Costa Coffee is set to become the first coffee chain in the UK to pledge that it will recycle the same amount of disposable cups as it sells to stop huge numbers of them going to landfill. This adds up to around 500 million cups per year, and they want to achieve this by 2020. Believe it or not, this is still only one fifth of the total amount of takeaway coffee cups that are sold each year.

Disposable cups are recyclable, as long as they are collected properly and taken to the correct recycling plants. Costa have announced they will pay to have the cups collected and taken to paper recycling plants that can process them.

This means that the three paper recycling plants in the UK that can recycle disposable cups will be recycling 100 million cups this year.

The company will pay £70 per tonne of cups collected to waste collection companies to make it financially attractive to the firms, who they hope will put sound infrastructure in place to collect, sort, and transport the cups to recycling plant.

Costa are working in partnership with five national waste collection firms- Veolia, Biffa, Suez, Grundon and First Mile.

The coffee chain’s managing director said that they hope that what they’re doing will dispel the myth that coffee cups can’t be recycled. He called on other coffee chains to follow suit and added that there was no reason that all coffee cups couldn’t be recycled.

Costa say that they want to guarantee customers that if they put their cup in the correct recycling bin, it will be collected and recycled.

The environment minister congratulated Costa on helping people do ‘the right thing’ and said it was a big step towards increasing the amount of coffee cups that are recycled in the UK.

Costa was the first coffee chain to introduce a nationwide in-store recycling scheme, and they even accepted paper cups from other retailers. They have recycled 14 million coffee cups since February 2017.