The Waste Mountain of Coffee Cups [Infographic]

Sam Butterworth http://www.eco2greetings.com 1m 293

The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.

Coffee Cup Waste

Everyone loves – and often depends on – a coffee, and many of us buy them on the go daily. And perhaps we presume that, because take away coffee cups are made of paper, they can be recycled. However, the vast majority can not and it seems that is a huge problem for the environment.

The truth is that so-called paper coffee cups are lined with a layer of polyethylene so they can’t simply be recycled along with cardboard or plastic. It turns out that this is a difficult combination to recycle, which means that 399 out of 400 coffee cups in the USA can not be reused, and have to be dumped in landfill sites.

So what kind of figures does that equate to across the USA? Well, quite staggering figures, it turns out. Every year around 50 billion paper coffee cups that can’t be recycled are thrown away in the US. If all of those coffee cups were collected in one place it would create a literal mountain of waste, that would reach more than 700 metres high. Compare that to the 184 metre high Space Needle (the current home of Starbucks in Seattle) and you’ll see that that really is an incredible amount of waste.

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So what can we do to curb this ongoing environmental disaster? One option is that we could stop drinking coffee, which won’t go down well with the many caffeine-addicted people who can’t operate until their morning coffee has gone down. Another option is to take your own coffee out on your commute in a flask. But what really needs to happen is for coffee shops everywhere to invest in cups that simply can be recycled.