Carbon Footprint: Just One Change

Want your business to reduce its carbon footprint? Start by 'binning' single-use coffee cups.

In Ireland alone, 22,000 single-use coffee cups are binned every hour. That's 528,000 single-use drinks cups per day. Every day of the year - bar Christmas Day.

Once a symbol of cool, plastic coffee cups have become a ubiquitous part of our disposable culture. Present at every turn, they can be found in even the remotest parts of Ireland, from Malin to Mizen Head. Look closely enough, and you'll probably find one wedged amongst the craggy rocks of Skellig Michael. The sad fact is that these little blighters are as omnipresent in our daily lives as sweet wrappers, smuts and plastic bottles.

Contrary to 'popular opinion' coffee cups are not recyclable. Lined with leak-proof plastic, they do not meet recycling criteria. As for compostable coffee cups, the majority end up in landfill. Those that do make it into recycling bins often end up contaminating other recyclable goods through residual liquid content.

Compostable Cups are not the Solution

According to environmental advocates such as George Monbiot, compostable coffee cups are not the answer to the plastic cup epidemic. Why? Because the materials used in their production require cultivation, harvesting, processing and transportation, all of which consume both energy and water, thereby negating much of the good compostable cups might do.

Replacing one single-use packaging with another doesn't solve the problem of “mass disposability”. Instead, what is required is a change in attitude towards consumption and the level of consumption itself.

Most well-known cafe franchises now offer discounts and other initiatives to customers when purchasing or presenting keep cups. At least 1,700 cafes and coffee shops in Ireland now offer some form of customer incentive, and the drive appears to be working, with reports showing a sharp rise in the sales of keep cups.

Corporates please copy #carbonfootprint

While a government 'latte levy' on single-use containers might be the fastest route to change, as concerned citizens, we still have the power to buck the plastic trend.

Where individuals have gone, corporates need to follow. Most organisations and large businesses have their own in-house coffee dock, restaurant, staff canteen, all of which sell takeaway drinks and soups. If one were to tot up the number of throwaway cups sold in the likes of the Tech Giants alone, the figures would run into the tens of thousands. By rolling out a plastic-free policy and having their providers switch to keep cups, large businesses could help significantly lower the use of plastic cups and containers in Ireland.

Employees bringing their own cup is one small but significant step towards reducing our carbon footprint as individuals, as businesses, and as a nation.

The good news is that by using keep cups, we will save, on average, between 80-120kg of CO2 per annum. Even better is the fact that once a reusable cup has been used more than 15 times, it becomes sustainable.

Maybe then those mountains of single-use cups in landfill will finally start to dwindle until, at some point in the future, they'll finally disappear for good.

For information on ISO 14001 Environmental Management System Standard and how implementing an EMS will help reduce your organisation's carbon footprint, contact the team on hello@cgbc.ie.