Coffee addicts in Burton and South Derbyshire may get the chance to help the environment while sipping on their favourite frappes after coffee giant Costa unveiled plans to recycle as many disposable cups as it sells by 2020.
The UK's largest coffee shop chain, which currently has four stores in Burton and plans for another, hopes the effort will cut the number of disposable cups sent to landfill.
The popular drink chain said it will recycle up to 500 million disposable coffee cups a year, including those from other retailers to match the number it hands out, and it has urged other chains to do the same.
As part of the plans the company will pay waste collectors a supplement of £70 per tonne of cups they send to recycling plants, increasing the value of a bale by 150 per cent to £125, making it commercially attractive for them to put in place the infrastructure to collect, sort and transport the cups to specialist facilities, said a spokesman.
This will see customers at existing Costa shops such as in Coopers Square shopping centre; The Octagon shopping centre; the drive-thru off Derby Road, and a Costa Coffee inside Tesco, on St Peter's Bridge, contribute to a more effective recycling system, it says.
The chain, which has 2,380 shops in the UK, said the recycling move would work alongside its efforts to encourage customers to use reusable cups, including a 25p discount for those who bring their own mugs.
It would also continue to work with cup manufacturers to minimise and eventually eliminate plastic in takeaway cups.
Costa managing director Dominic Paul, said: "By creating a market for cups as a valuable recyclable material, we are confident that we can transform the UK's ineffective and inconsistent 'binfrastructure' to ensure hundreds of millions of cups get recycled every year.
"One hundred million cups will be recycled this year alone following this announcement, and if the nation's other coffee chains sign up, there is no reason why all takeaway cups could not be recycled by as early as 2020.
"At Costa we want to guarantee our customers that if they throw their cup into a recycling bin it will get recycled, and today's announcement is a major step towards that happening."
The move comes just months after South Derbyshire residents were urged to recycle single use plastic-lined paper cups at six special recycling banks, across the county.
Food and drink cartons, including cups, often end up in landfill because they are difficult to recycle. In South Derbyshire alone thousands end up in the district council's black bins for non-recyclable items, the authority said.
But there is now a way to recycle them thanks to a nationwide scheme using a carton recycling facility in Halifax, Yorkshire, which South Derbyshire District Council signed up to.
The carton facility was initially not developed with cups in mind but, in January, following extensive trials, the drinks carton industry group Alliance for Beverage Cartons and Environment (ACE UK) entered into an agreement to accept plastic-lined paper cups at the plant.
The district council has become one of the first authorities in the country to sign up to the new initiative as part of its commitment to recycling 19,395 tonnes of household waste per year and 182 tonnes from bring banks per year.
Currently seven million single-use beverage cups are used each day in the UK – the equivalent of 2.5 billion a year. However, at the moment just one in 400 such cups are recycled.
To recycle the paper cups they are pulped alongside food and drink cartons using a large rotating screw which separates the fine polyethylene layers from the paperboard layers and breaks the paperboard down into a fibre slurry.
This takes about 20 to 30 minutes and it is then cleaned, filtered and stored in a large tank ready to be blended with other paper.
When they are recycled, the recovered fibres from the cartons and cups are used to made coreboard for industrial tubes and cores.
South Derbyshire councillor Peter Watson, chairman of the environmental and development services committee at the district council, said: "Coffee cups cannot be recycled through our household collections, so it is really positive to be able to offer this opportunity to residents.
"The people of South Derbyshire have always responded well to the different recycling schemes we have implemented, and we hope that they will take full advantage of this new service . "
More details on recycling in South Derbyshire can be found by visiting www.south-derbys.gov.uk
Paper cups can be recycled at the following locations:
- Station Road car park, Hatton
- Main Street car park, Hilton
- High Street car park, Melbourne
- Limetree Avenue, Midway (near the Hillcrest Fish Bar)
- Woodville Road car park, Overseal
- Twyford Road playing field car park, Willington
