James Cropper Supports Coffee Cup Fund #InTheLoop
Cup Cube Installation, London - #InTheLoop
The ‘Cup Cube’ was an installation on London's South Bank as part of Hubbub’s The Cup Fund - the UK's largest grant fund to boost coffee cup recycling, supporting ambitious projects nationwide in setting up bespoke coffee cup schemes. Hubbub explains that there’s capacity in the UK to recycle cups (via James Cropper CupCycling™), but there isn’t currently the infrastructure to make it easy for the public to do their bit.
“Disposable cups are made up of 95% high quality paper fibre with a 5% thin coating of polyethylene (plastic). Using our unique CupCycling™ facility, which has the capacity to upcycle 500 million cups every year, 95% of waste is converted back into paper and energy is derived from the remaining plastic in the production of recycled paper. This gives second life to valuable fibre and creates a closed loop solution to the global problem of disposable cup waste.”Richard Burnett, Recovered Fibre Operations Manager, James Cropper
The Cup Cube, made out of 5,555 single use cups, represents the number we get through every minute in the UK. The small patch of black cups represents the 4% that get currently get recycled. ‘Paper’ coffee cups are lined with a plastic film, which means they can’t be recycled with other paper goods or in general mixed recycling. They need their own bins...
Funding has been put towards recycling facilities, creating new partnerships and delivering high quality behaviour change communications in high footfall areas – five projects in central London and seven further locations across the UK including Bristol and York. Cup recycling facilities will be appearing in a whole range places including high streets, workplaces, universities, shopping centres and motorway service stations.
The campaign is supported by Starbucks pioneering 5p cup charge which is applied when a customer chooses to use a single-use paper cup instead of a reusable. These funds are donated to Hubbub each year and go towards everything from reducing plastic pollution to increasing recycling on-the-go.
CupCycling™ by James Cropper is the world’s first recycling process dedicated to upcycling take-away cups.
We give them a second life and turn them into beautiful papers and packaging.
CupCycling™ is a collaborative process:
Coffee outlets, cafés and retailers as well as other businesses 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.
Did you know that out of the 3 billion coffee cups the UK gets through every year, only 4% of them are currently recycled?
This is because coffee cups can’t be recycled in normal recycling bins due to them being made of a sturdy mix of paper and plastic.
