Coffee Cup Recycling

CupCycling™ - Turning coffee cups into beautiful luxury papers

CupCycling™ by James Cropper is the world’s first recycling process and award winning innovation dedicated to upcycling take-away coffee cups.

Giving them a new life and turning them into beautiful luxury papers and bespoke packaging.

A World's First in Recycling

CupCycling™ is all about collaboration. Working with supply chain partners and brands who care about the environment.

Coffee outlets, cafés or retailers as well as other businesses can send used paper cups to James Cropper for Cupcycling™, by working with our recycling and waste management partners.

The cups are collected and baled close to source, so that they can be delivered to us efficiently on a large scale.

We rescue the fibres

95% of cup waste is converted back in to paper and the remaining 5% of plastic is used for energy recovery in the production of recycled paper.

We create beautiful papers

At James Cropper Paper, we make bespoke, luxury paper for brands all over the world.

By choosing CupCycling™ fibres, our customers really stand out from the crowd - creating environmentally friendly papers and packaging that are less wasteful, more beautiful.

Why James Cropper CupCycling™?

At James Cropper, Britain’s Master Papermakers, sustainability is at the heart of everything we do – from sourcing raw materials, to the investment in renewable energy, and world-leading recycling innovation.

Our unique recycling plant has the capacity to recycle 500 million coffee cups every year.

Through CupCycling™, we’re enabling brands to work with us to become part of a movement that has the potential to revolutionise coffee cup recycling forever.

Download our Brochure

From Cup to Paper

"With our partners James Cropper and Veolia, we can take coffee cups, a waste product of ours and transform it into our yellow kraft bag, thereby closing the loop on that particular waste stream. Not only that, but the bags can still be recycled for years to come. We're proud to be the first retailer to upcycle our cups in this way. Our customers are becoming ever more aware of global waste issues and I think our customers will appreciate the story behind the bag."

Chris Brant, Director for Retail Projects and FM - Selfridges

185 million Coffee Cups Recycled

2.5 billion cups are thrown away each year in the UK, the polyethylene coating of coffee cups means that they are only recyclable through specialist facilities.

Our CupCycling™ facility removes the plastic lining during the process meaning that 95% of the cup waste can be converted back in to paper and the remaining 5% of plastic is used for energy recovery in the production of recycled paper.

View our CupCycling™ Partner Stories.

"Without technology like James Cropper CupCycling™ Costa would not have been able to accelerate our cup recycling scheme, allowing us to commit to recycling the same volume of cups we put on to the market each year by 2020."

Dominic Paul, Managing Director - Costa Coffee