On your way to work do you pick up a take-away coffee? Then you are far from alone. These cups are usually disposed of in the trash and that adds up to a lot of extra waste in landfills. But now there is an alternative to single-use coffee cups. A Danish city is trialing a reusable cup that can be used and returned like plastic drink bottles and cans.
The Return System
The project in the Danish city of Aarhus launched a three-year trial that began in January 2024, and focused on eliminating disposable cups, reported Forbes. It is a collaboration between the municipality and the recycling company TOMRA.
Aarhus is the second largest city in Denmark with a population of 336,000, many of whom consume coffee and are potential users of single-use disposable coffee cups. The amount of trash produced by these disposables is growing at an unsustainable rate. That’s when the city decided something had to be done to turn this around, reported Euronews.
“Through waste analysis, we discovered that 45 percent of waste in Aarhus came from takeaway packaging,” Simon Smedegaard Rossau, project manager for circular packaging at Aarhus Municipality told Euronews. “This finding was a turning point.”
(Courtesy REUSABLE)
How it Works
The return system is relatively easy. The consumer pays a small deposit when purchasing their coffee that is returned when the cups and your credit card are inserted in the deposit machine. The return machines are open air, with most of them located on main shopping streets.
To get started, the machines had to be built, decisions had to be made on where to place them, and the cups had to be created. But just because the system is in place doesn’t mean that people will use it. At the trial stage, this is all voluntary.
The retailer does not have to handle collecting or washing the containers. TOMRA is responsible for emptying the machines and transporting the cups to an industrial sanitization facility in Aarhus, according to a news release from the company.
In this initial phase, the focus is on hot and cold beverage cups but it can be increased to include other types of packaging.
“TOMRA believes reusable takeaway packaging will be an increasingly important and necessary part of a circular approach to waste management, and we are determined to provide novel, attractive, and efficient solutions to enable this,” Geir Sæther, TOMRA senior vice president and head of TOMRA Reuse. said in the news release.
“We believe that a shared infrastructure with automated collection points is a prerequisite for successful implementation. In addition to the technical setup, another key success factor for broader adoption is that the system is accompanied by policy frameworks that will ensure that these systems are utilized,” he said.
A year into the trial more than 700,000 of the white plastic cups with a blue lid have been returned. But only time will tell how well it catches on.
Ditching single-use coffee cups for a reusable one will make cities cleaner and much greener. A small amount of inconvenience can make a big difference in helping the planet.
(Courtesy REUSABLE)
