Coffee to go makes a pile of rubbish

FOLLOWING the County Kerry Clean Up Day in 2016, a waste audit from a sample of bags established that 30 per cent of litter collected from the roadsides consisted of paper cups – typically used for coffee on the go.

This is new litter, as if we needed more, which did not exist in any great quantity less than 10 years ago. However, in its brief existence, it is beginning to create problems on every highway and byway in the country. Inevitably the coffee cup is thrown from the moving car within a few kilometres of town, and it will rest on the roadside until the local tidy town group or volunteer community group comes to pick it up on County Clean Up Day, which this year falls on April 8.

The paper coffee cup, as recently described in The Guardian Newspaper, is one of modern life’s consumer conundrums. It is ubiquitous, yet coveted; pricey, yet just about affordable. It confers status in a world where you need to be busy to be important, while telling everyone you had time to wait in line while the beans were ground and the milk was steamed. And now there is one more problem to add to the list, because the paper coffee cup in Ireland is not recyclable. It may have some potential in the future, but at present they are all landfilled – millions of them!

A conservative estimate puts the number of paper cups handed out by coffee shops in the UK at 3 billion, which works out at more than 8 million a day. I do not have the figures for the number of coffee cups used annually in Ireland, but no doubt is also alarmingly high.

The problems all begin with the cup. It is made from paper laminated with plastic, to be watertight. But the compound creates a complicated recycling proposition. It cannot be viably treated as pure paper. First, the plastic coating needs to be separated from the high-quality paper fibre of the cup itself. “There’s a real challenge to separate compound materials,” says Jonny Hazell of Green Alliance. This problem is not unique to coffee cups. Capri-Sun, laminated crisp packets, and pizza boxes all present similar challenges (the grease stains are deemed a contaminant).

Hazell describes the purgatory of a mixed recycling box as it gets “taken off to a big shed with lots of conveyor belts. As that box of materials goes around the belts, individual materials will be pulled out. An adapted potato filter sorts the paper. There’s a magnet to pull out the metals. Jets of air to pull out the plastic.” A paper cup would not be filtered with ordinary paper – and thus is landfilled or incinerated.

So if you had a coffee ‘to go’ this morning – where is the empty cup now? Please do not leave them on the roadsides to be collected by the volunteers on April 8 during the County Clean Up Day.

MÍCHEÁL Ó COILEÁIN