Coffee cup conundrums for cafes
Cafes around New Zealand are taking on ‘‘cupcycling’’ schemes but some pioneers are getting rid of coffee packaging altogether.
Sweet Release Cakes and Treats owner Kris Bartley is the second in Wellington to say goodbye to takeaway coffee cups, following Aro Bake.
Bartley said she had wanted to get rid of the cups since last year. ‘‘It got to a point last month where I said I was just making excuses, and I want to stop it now.’’
Each year, 295 million cups are estimated to go to landfill and only one in 400 ‘‘compostable’’ cups are estimated to reach an appropriate industrial compost facility.
Bartley said customers of her cafe, which is also 100 per cent vegan, weren’t suffering from the lack of convenience. ‘‘Everyone’s been up for it and promised to bring in their Keep Cups.’’
Now the small cafe on Willis St is building a mug library, where mugs can come and go from the store, and customers are already bringing in their donated cups.
The business is also considering a range of options to become more sustainable and abandoning the convenience of coffee cups was just the start, Bartley said.
She’s investigating making plastic free, zero-waste tofu, vegan butter and plant milks – items rare to find plastic free.
Aro Bake stopped providing takeaway cups in May and is believed to be the first in the country to do so.
Bartley said once people thought getting rid of single-use plastic bags was too difficult but from this week, they have been banned in New Zealand.
It could be the same for takeaway coffee cups. Removing them from cafes would push customers to make better choices.
Bartley said she just wished she’d made the change earlier. Mug libraries, returnable ‘‘boomerang cups’’ and cupcycling schemes are being used by businesses to put an end to coffee-cup waste.
Last year, Vic Books cafe at Victoria University’s Pipitea campus introduced a ‘‘Boomerang cup’’ idea for coffee drinkers – they can take a real mug away and return it.
At NZ Post House in Wellington, local cafe Kanteen diverts about 100 cups a day from the landfill by offering reusable cups to borrow, made by IdealCup. Those can be easily returned – they’re rinsed and left in the kitchens in the building at the end of the day, and cleaners bring them back down to the cafe. Again Again cups, a returnable cup scheme launched in Wellington last year, now has about 90 cafes signed up and is also spreading to Auckland. Customers have to either bring their own cups, or they can ‘‘hire’’ a reusable steel cup for $3, getting their money back when they return it.
The company now has about 70,000 returnable cups now in circulation, for which consumers receive a refund if they return them to any participating cafe.