Cup a load of this

© Simon Poulter 2017

For some people, the cup of coffee you see here on the right is a dependency. "It's my crutch" and "I couldn't start my day without it". Indeed, in the first couple of hours of the working day in the City of London, where my office is, you must keep your eyes peeled for fellow desk drones powering along the pavement, a rigid arm extended, cup in hand, like a cross between a Dalek and a Lego figure (perfectly formed for beverage carrying with their holed fists as, effectively, cup holders).

I first witnessed this coffee-cup-as-urban-street-accessory fashion 20 years ago in Seattle, America's self-appointed coffee capital. On every street corner people were engaged in conversation, lidded coffee cups in hand, lattes going cold. In New York, the outstretched arm-and-cup combo soon became a fixture as the coffee chains proliferated (there are more than 200 branches of Starbucks in Manhattan alone). Today, it is a common sight in almost every major city around the world.

Such is the prevalence of takeout coffee in London that the city contributes five million of the seven million cups that the entire UK throws away - every single day. That amounts to around 2.5 billion each year. The chains, mindful of their corporate reputations, have made much of making the cups as recyclable as possible...or so we thought. And, so, we dutifully stand over our office recycling bins, separating cups and plastic lids and the corrugated cardboard collars, thinking that we're doing something good for the planet and Brer Polar Bear. But no. It is now believed that less than 1% of those cups - 1 in 400 - actually ends up being recycled, with the vast majority ending up in landfill. Such is the scale of the problem that environmentalists have called on the government to introduce a tax similar to the 5p plastic bag charge to encourage people to use their own reusable cups and mugs.

However, the reason why it is not so easy to properly process these , however, is a simple case of municipal inefficiency: for all the green virtues of the cups' design - with recyclable cardboard and plastic - they have a fundamental flaw: a thin film of resin that keeps the coffee in which, I'm sure you'll appreciate, is something of a prerequisite. And it's this plastic lining that can't be easily separated from recyclable components by existing recycling techniques.

However, the City of London Corporation, along with the coffee chains and various large employers in the Square Mile, have launched a scheme to introduce recycling bins together with the start-up Simply Cups, which brands itself as "the UK's ONLY active cup recycling scheme". It has developed new techniques to effectively separate the cup components and make them fully recyclable, with the recycled materials ending up being used for everything from park benches to pens which will be then donated to schools, community projects and other beneficiaries.

The Corporation's 'Square Mile Challenge' is asking City firms with more than 500 employees to sign up to the scheme to have Simply Cups bins installed in their offices. The first 30 companies who do will even receive a year’s free collection. McDonald's, Costa and Pret a Manger have already been involved in a trial of the collection service. Simply Cups' Peter Goodwin says that the issue of coffee cups should be treated with the same degree of importance by companies and their employees as paper recycling: "Large numbers of coffee cups are binned in offices as people arrive at work or pop out for coffees throughout the day. We’d like to see responsible disposal of these cups become as commonplace as paper recycling schemes in offices and we hope that seeing the products that can be produced from their recycled cups will help motivate city workers to support the recycling effort."

Of course, use of one's own reusable cup is probably the most economic of all, especially as the coffee chains and their suppliers appear to be taking their time developing cups based on new, fully recyclable materials. But in the meantime, the City of London's campaign will at least create awareness of the enormous daily waste that I, by own admission, contribute to.