Costa pledges to recycle as many cups as it sells

THE UK’S largest coffee shop chain has pledged to recycle as many disposable cups as it sells by 2020 in an effort to cut the number sent to landfill.

Costa Coffee said it will recycle up to 500 million disposable coffee cups a year, including those from other retailers to match the number it hands out, and has urged other chains to do the same.

There is growing pressure to tackle the 2.5 billion disposable coffee cups the UK gets through every year, with almost all of them incinerated, exported or sent to landfill.

However, Costa said it was a “misconception” the problem with recycling cups was because their plastic lining was difficult to separate from the cardboard, and was instead to do with their collection after customers had put them into recycling bins.

The firm said it will pay waste collectors a supplement of £70 per tonne of cups they send to recycling plants, raising the value of a bale by 150% to £125 making it commercially attractive for them to create the infrastructure to collect, sort and transport cups to specialist facilities.

Costa managing director Dominic Paul said: “By creating a market for cups as a valuable recyclable material, we can transform the UK’S ineffective and inconsistent ‘binfrastructure’ to ensure hundreds of millions of cups get recycled every year.

“One hundred million cups will be recycled this year following the announcement and if the nation’s other coffee chains sign up, there is no reason why all takeaway cups could not be recycled by 2020.