Tidy Towns start campaigns to cut out takeaway cups
The battle to make single-use, takeaway coffee cups a thing of the past has begun in north Wicklow.
Two Bray coffee shops have signed up to the ‘Conscious Cup Campaign’, with others preparing to come on board, while over in Greystones, the local Tidy Towns group is signing cafés up to participate in a similar scheme.
Takeaway cups are neither recyclable or compostable in Ireland, meaning that over 200 million takeaway cups are dumped in landfill or incinerated each year.
With that in mind, the Tidy Towns groups in Bray and Greystones are trying to get people and cafes to change their habits and switch to reuseable cups.
Bray Tidy Towns has already signed Maison Moli on Florence Road and Café Letterario on Albert Walk up to it ‘conscious cup campaign’, which aims to encourage people to switch to reusable cups and persuade coffee shops to accept those cups and perhaps offer a reward in the form of a discount or points for customers using reusable cups.
Students from North Wicklow Educate Together secondary school have joined Bray Tidy Towns on the campaign path, and a number of seafront cafés are now in the process of signing up.
Over in Greystones, the ‘Every Cup Counts’ campaign is gathering pledges from every café in the town to sell reusable coffee cups. The group is also asking cafés to offer a discount to customers for using their own reusable cups.
Tidy Towns members are supplying cafés with their Greystones-branded ‘Keep Cups’ to sell and are also investigating the use of compostable cups as an alternative to the standard disposable cups.
The campaign was triggered by the ever-growing number of disposable cups evident throughout the town.
A spokesperson for Greystones Tidy Towns said they were staggered to learn that millions of takeaway coffee cups were going to landfill in Ireland on a daily basis and felt compelled to do something.
‘It is up to everyone to be accountable for their actions and not let that cup of coffee or tea cost the earth,’ the spokesperson said.