Takeaway
coffee cups recyclable or not? Well unfortunately it’s not a simple yes or no
answer at the moment and does the confusion exist and what is the best way to dispose
of your disposable cups whether takeaway coffee cups are recyclable or not is
one of the most controversial questions in the recycling industry at the
moment. The takeaway coffee cups are made by covering cardboard with a thin
layer of plastic to make it waterproof. The takeaway coffee cups are pretty
much the same material as milk and juice cartons which are accepted in
recycling almost everywhere. How the cardboard and plastic behave in the
recycling process particularly during pulping is the source of all the
controversy. They can’t be turned back into paper products and therefore become
a waste product if the cardboard fibers remain attached to the plastic. Some
recycling processors consider disposable cups a contaminant and have teamed up
with workplaces, particularly large businesses, and some councils to tell
people to keep coffee cups out of the recycling. There has also been a fair bit
of media, like the ABC’s War on Waste, and social media that says cups are not
recyclable.
However,
there have been reports by both industry groups and major recyclers which
clearly state that coffee cups are recyclable in co-mingled and mixed paper
bins. A September 2015 report on the recyclability of poly-coated (i.e. plastic
coated) fiber prepared for the Australian Packaging Covenant said that (hot) coffee
cups “were more likely to break down in the pulping process because of their
material composition [as they have thin] polyethylene coatings, they are more
susceptible to water ingress, more rapid breakdown and improved recovery of
fiber. So as you can see there are confusing and conflicting messages. The
industry is talking about these issues and will hopefully come to a consensus
soon. At Work: Two of the general recycling rules are ‘if in doubt, leave it
out’ and ‘follow the rules’. Both of
which apply here. If your workplace says
‘no cups in the recycling’ it’s best to follow that rule. If the recycling contractor considers cups a
contaminant they may levy fines on bins with cups in them.
At home, if
your council accepts milk and juice cartons their systems should be able to
handle the odd coffee cup without any problem. If you have a single coffee on
the way home from the bakery, for example, then it’s safe to say it can go in
your home comingled recycling without much concern. And according to green chip,
the developer of the prep tool, the simple act of flattening paper cups mean
they will move though the sorting station in the best way. Switch to reusable
which is best of all, ditch the disposable and all this confusion and switch to
a reusable cup. A study found that in
terms of the energy used in manufacturing, re-usable cups break-even with paper
cups fairly quickly. It takes just fifteen uses for a glass cup to break even,
it’s seventeen for a plastic re-usable and thirty-nine for ceramic. So the more
often you use your re-usable the lower the overall impact.
