Coffee cup scheme steams ahead
A zero-waste coffee cup scheme new to Wellington will be extended to about 90 cafes this year and could be expanded to Auckland.
Again Again’s pilot in the capital last year was ‘‘outstanding’’, and all of the 14 cafes involved agreed to pay for it at the end of the trial, co-founder Nada Piatek said.
‘‘People like the feel of the cup. Customers said the stainless steel was weird for a start but actually the sense of cleanliness was a positive.’’
Now the company has $10,000 funding from Wellington City Council to take the returnable cups to 90 cafes by the end of August this year.
Its target is to save a minimum of 60,000 cups from landfill at the end of the six-month rollout.
The steel cups can be ‘‘checked out’’ for a $3 fee, which is refunded when the washed cup is returned to any cafe participating in the trial.
Piatek said the company had no measure of how many of the cups had not been returned.
‘‘There are people out there with three or four cups on their desk and they’ll eventually think ‘Oh, I should take those back’.’’
The pilot’s aim was to have 20 per cent of customers choosing an Again Again cup instead of a takeaway cup, she said.
That target was exceeded with 23 per cent of people choosing the steel cup instead.
‘‘From an environmental perspective, that means that a quarter of the cups that would have gone out in to the environment didn’t.’’
Most cafes had reached the point where the scheme was economically viable, she said.