Nearly everybody has a reusable cup (or three) of their kitchen cabinet, however the comfort of disposable cups usually triumphs on the morning espresso run.
In Australia, an estimated 1.8bn single use espresso cups go to waste every year, and the quantity exceeds 500bn globally.
Alongside latest bans on non-compostable single use cups, from swap schemes to reusables, what can we do to curb espresso cup waste?
Washing up
At Alphington Farmers Market in north-east Melbourne, you received’t see any disposable espresso cups. As a substitute, their wash in opposition to waste station saves an estimated 500 cups from landfill each Sunday.
“We now have a lot of ready-to-eat stalls, and they’re extraordinary small companies,” says Anne Duncan, CEO of Melbourne Farmers Markets.
“Say 15 years in the past, these ready-to-eat stalls would have served you your meal on a plastic plate or in a clamshell field … however these utensils and crockery would have been single use.”
On the wash station – a trailer with a small business dishwasher – workers and volunteers wash plates, bowls, cutlery and cups for patrons and stallholders to reuse, eliminating the necessity for single-use packaging.
A part of Darebin metropolis council, which grew to become the first authorities on this planet to declare a local weather emergency in 2016, the markets have additionally banned plastic luggage as a part of waste discount efforts and their bakery is a taking part retailer of Wangim, a cup swap program utilized by over 20 cafes within the space.
“I used to be just a little bit involved about how the neighborhood would view issues that had been utilized by any individual else,” says Duncan.
“We’ve arrange this specific station with a business dishwasher with particular sanitising gear that might assure cleanliness. But in addition there’s an actual starvation for doing one thing that the neighborhood feels is in one of the best pursuits of the atmosphere.”
Swapping and reusing
When zero-waste cafe Cat and Cow opened in Sydney’s jap suburbs 5 years in the past, it provided reusable cups or BYO mugs solely. However lower than a yr in, Covid pressured the cafe to usher in disposable cups.
“It seems like we’re nonetheless recovering from it,” says co-owner Lenka Kriz.
“We now have prospects are available in now, 4 years later, and so they’re like … ‘I nonetheless haven’t used my KeepCup since Covid.’”
Cat and Cow makes use of reusable Huskee cups for dine in prospects, in addition to utilizing Huskee’s swap program for takeaways. The cafe additionally has a mug library to make single use cups (which they cost an additional 20c for) the final resort.
“I’d slightly wash folks’s cups than put their espresso in a disposable cup, as a result of for me it’s 10 seconds of my time versus this factor staying right here for ever,” says Kriz.
Neighborhood initiatives are additionally utilizing the swap mannequin to scale back waste. Swap for Good, a program launched by Northern Seashores Council in Sydney, labored with espresso cup swap suppliers together with HuskeeSwap, Inexperienced Caffeen, Returnr and Claycups to scale back the usage of disposable cups. Greater than 60 native companies within the space are actually swapping cups.
Sitting in
Espresso tradition is cherished in Australia, however we are inclined to drink on the go. In Italy morning espresso is drunk standing on the bar, whereas in Japan it’s not thought-about well mannered to stroll and drink espresso.
Right here, Duncan says we see espresso as a “heat hug to begin the day”, however says understanding how folks take into consideration their morning espresso is a chance for companies.
“Altering any type of human behaviour begins with a recognition of the place we’re for the time being, which is ‘I need one thing so I can shortly get on the bus’, says Duncan.
“How can we make that not a single use espresso cup?”
At Cat and Cow, Kriz says she and her workers attempt to educate prospects to suppose in another way about their waste, encouraging them to take 5 minutes to dine in as an alternative.
Whereas Kriz can’t see herself eliminating disposable cups altogether (about 30% of her prospects go for single use), she wish to see cafes make an effort to scale back their quantity, one thing that has the additional advantage of being an enormous price saving for companies.
“I really feel like it will possibly actually remodel the way in which you take pleasure in your espresso. For me, as quickly as one thing is in a takeaway, disposable container, it seems like the worth goes down,” says Kriz.
“Folks may have their very own habits, their very own preferences, however simply providing the choices and inspiring reusability is the way in which to go.”
Recycling proper
The environmental impression of disposable cups is nice – 6.5m bushes are reduce down yearly to provide the 16bn paper cups used globally. The KeepCup impression calculator estimates that consuming simply three coffees per week in a reusable espresso cup saves 5.5kg of CO2e. It could additionally save half a kilo of plastic and 150 espresso cups.
Whereas the plastic lining on disposable cups is important to forestall leakage, it makes could make them near-impossible to recycle. Cat and Cow’s takeaway cups for instance are absolutely compostable, however nonetheless depend on the neighborhood recycling them correctly.
Whereas the recognition of the KeepCup mannequin skyrocketed greater than a decade in the past, many nonetheless favour comfort. With initiatives just like the wash station, Duncan says the important thing to elevating consciousness is giving folks what they want within the second.
“You are able to do precisely what you need on a Saturday morning with out having to arrange … let’s simply make it so simple as we will to take the following child step.”