If cities can improve recycling on a mass scale, about one in 25 coffee cups could be recycled in just a few years, up from 1 in 400, according to the U.K.’s Paper Cup Recovery & Recycling Group. That’s a big “if.” Consumers usually toss their coffee cups attached to their plastic lids, which then have to be separated before they can be recycled, separately .Dunkin’ says it’s working with municipalities to make sure that cups that can be recycled actually will be. “It’s a journey—I don’t think it will ever be over,” says Dunkin’s Murphy. McDonald’s Corp. recently teamed with Starbucks and other quick-serve restaurants to back the $10 million NextGen Cup Challenge—a “moon shot” to develop, accelerate and scale a more sustainable to-go cup. In February, the contest announced 12 winners, including cups made of compostable and recyclable paperboard; the development of a plant-based lining that could keep liquid in; and schemes aimed at encouraging reusable cup use.
“We’re looking for solutions that are near-term commercially viable and things that are aspirational,” said Bridget Croke, vice president of external affairs at Closed Loop Partners, a recycling-focused investment firm which is managing the challenge.
A cup that can degrade more quickly would be one solution—Europe’s ban makes an exception for compostable cups that disintegrate in 12 weeks—but even if such a cup were readily available and cost-effective, the U.S. doesn’t have enough of the industrial composting facilities needed to break them down. In that case, they head to the landfills, where they won’t decompose at all .
At its annual meeting in 2018, Starbucks quietly tested a coffee cup made from the recycled parts of other coffee cups, widely considered the coffee cup’s holy grail. It was an act of performance art as much as anything else: In order to engineer the limited run, the coffee chain collected truckloads of cups and sent them for processing to a Sustana batch pulper in Wisconsin. From there, the fibers traveled to a WestRock Co. paper mill in Texas to be turned into cups, which were printed with logos by yet another company.Even if the ensuing cup was better for the environment, the process used to make it certainly wasn’t. “There is a big engineering challenge here,” said Closed Loop's Croke. “It's been clear the solutions companies have been working on to solve this issue really haven't been fast enough.”
So governments, like Berkeley’s, aren’t waiting. The municipality surveyed residents before it imposed the charge and found it would convince more than 70 percent to start bringing their own cups with the 25-cent surcharge, said Miriam Gordon, program director at nonprofit group Upstream, which helped Berkeley write its legislation.The charge is meant to be an experiment in human behavior, rather than a traditional tax. Berkeley’s coffee shops keep the extra fees and can even lower their prices so that what the consumer pays stays the same. They just have to be clear that there is a surcharge. “It has to be visible to the customer,” Gordon said. “That’s what motivates people to change behavior.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.