Coffee cups that won’t decompose for 30 years

As pressure grows for plastic bag-style 5p levy in cafes, top professor warns of...

THE billions of disposable coffee cups dumped in landfill sites could take up to 30 years to decay, experts have warned.

Campaigners are now issuing fresh calls for a plastic bag- style 5p charge to tackle the waste caused by high street cafe chains.

Just one in every 400 cups handed out by firms including Costa, Starbucks and Pret a Manger is recycled because they include a plastic membrane that cannot easily be separated.

As a result, an estimated 2.5billion are binned and end up in dumps where they take decades to degrade, releasing greenhouse gases as they do so.

Environmental groups say they want firms to do much more to develop cups that can be easily recycled or do more to encourage customers to bring their own reusable vessels.

A leading academic has now warned that the thin plastic polyethylene skin in cups supplied by coffee chains is resistant to degradation and could take around 30 years to break down.

Chris Cheeseman, a professor of materials resources engineering at Imperial College London, said: ‘ Even then we don’t know for sure, because nobody has looked at the cup specifically,’ he said.

Even if there were no plastic lining, the cups could still take at least two years to start breaking down because they use high quality virgin paper which requires the felling of hundreds of thousands of trees.

‘ In terms of environmental impact the cellulose fibre is potentially more of an issue than the plastic,’ he said. ‘This could take 18 months to two years to start to break down and then it produces methane gas which is probably not collected.’

Campaigners across the globe have been putting pressure on coffee shops to change the way they operate. Groups and political parties in the UK, including Friends of the Earth and the Liberal Democrats, support the idea of a 5p charge.

The idea of using financial incentives to change shopping behaviour has already worked with the plastic bag fee, which was brought in following the Daily Mail’s Banish the Bags campaign.

Earlier this year, the then Tory environment minister Rory Stewart told MPs a fee could also be applied to coffee cups to prevent them feeding a tidal wave of litter and waste. The idea was quickly withdrawn via an official statement from his department.

However, even coffee shop giants have accepted that financial incentives to cut the use of throwaway vessels are worth trying. Starbucks gives customers a 25p discount if they bring their own re-usable cup. Costa gives a donation of 25p to charities including Keep Britain Tidy.

A charge would give coffee sellers an incentive to switch to cups that can be easily recycled. A British entrepreneur has already developed a cup that can be fully recycled and Starbucks has agreed to run a trial.

Head of campaigns at Friends of the Earth, Andrew Pendleton, said a charge – or an outright ban on those that cannot be recycled – should be considered.

‘The massive reduction in plastic bag use shows that just a small change in everyday habits can make a meaningful difference,’ he said.

‘Attention is now rightly turning to the estimated 2.5billion non-recyclable coffee cups that end up in landfill every year, and other by-products of modern life like the completely oversized boxes and excess packaging that results from online shopping.

Liberal Democrat environment spokesman Kate Parminter called for a 5p levy, adding: ‘It’s a disgrace that seven million cups are thrown away every day, mostly not recycled, and yet the Government simply turns a blind eye.’

Cardiff University academic Wouter Poortinga, who has studied public reaction to bag charges, said shoppers are opening up to the idea of similar levies for coffee cups and plastic bottles. ‘We’ve seen that the plastic charge has become increasingly popular since it was introduced, and that it has changed attitudes towards waste policies as well,’ he said.

Figures published earlier this week suggest the 5p charge has cut more than five billion plastic bags given out at tills. At the same time, more than £70million has been raised for good causes from the proceeds.