Firstly, full disclosure, for many years, we ran the busy Idaho Café, which sold a LOT of takeaway coffees, in single use cups. We were so proud of our sleek cup, that she even had her own Twitter account.
Then we had a had a “road to Damascus’ moment and adopted the reusable cup system and never bought another cup.
The facts.
In Ireland, 22,000 cups AN HOUR are used, that’s 200 million cups a year.
The cups are, despite some claims, not recyclable after use.
Yes, some cups are better than others. A cup made from sustainable forestry, has a lower carbon impact than others, a compostable cup, if composted, has a lower impact again. But here is the rub.
In truth, virtually no compostable cups are composted, there just are no on street compost bins for customers to use, so the vast majority of them end up in regular bins.
The lifecycle of a compostable cup.
Compostable cups are made from plant based starch, usually corn. Tens of thousands of acres of rainforest in Brazil have been burned, in order to plant corn, to make those “Green, renewable and sustainable cups”.
The corn is then processed and shipped by an oil burning cargo ship, to another country to be manufactured into a plant based plastic. This plastic is then shipped to a third country to be used a cup liner. The manufactured cup is then shipped to another country to be warehoused, before it is trucked to its final destination, a food service outlet.
I then order a cup of coffee, drink it in less than four minutes and the cup’s life is over.
I throw the cup into the bin, the bin is collected by a diesel powered truck and the cup is segregated as unusable waste. The waste is then baled and trucked to the local port where it is loaded onto a cargo vessel. This ship then navigates more than two thousand kilometres to Scandinavia where the waste is incinerated. ( Cups closer to Dublin may be burnt locally).
This just isn’t sustainable, on any level.
We cannot really ask the farming community to make cuts to their herds and their incomes, if we aren’t prepared to change a small, relatively new habit, like the single use cup.
Killarney has set the pace in Ireland, by effectively banning the single use cup and replacing it with a deposit based cup return scheme and promoting the use of reusable coffee cups. This must become the norm.
This Government has proved, during the pandemic, that it can enact legislation rapidly and effect change, but is continuing to delay any tax on single use cups, as “it is complex”.
In truth, we do not need a tax, we do not need laws, we need to change our habits.
If you go to buy petrol, you don’t expect the garage to give you a disposable bucket, you bring your own jerry can or petrol tank. We need to accept that perhaps, carrying our own cups is not the greatest lifestyle sacrifice, but will have one of the single greatest impacts on reducing waste that the planet can no longer afford.