Disposable coffee cups are a pain to recycle. That’s because typical paper coffee cups have a plastic lining, which means that in order to recycle them, you need to separate the materials, which requires specialized equipment. You would hope that more people would start using reusable cups rather than disposable ones because of, you know, the climate crisis.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case. In the UK alone, around 2.5 billion coffee cups are thrown out each year. So until we ban cafes from offering disposable cups, solutions are badly needed. One solution comes in the form of a company called Ashortwalk, which is producing a reusable mug called the rCup made out of old coffee cups.
To do this, they clean the cups and shred them into tiny pieces that they then blend with recycled polypropylene to create a new resin; the long fibers of the paper help strengthen the new material. By making one standard-sized mug, the company recycles six former cups. Making a new product from waste creates a new incentive for recyclers to process the material. The value per ton of used cups now is around £120 ($150) now, but the owner of Ashortwalk says if you convert those cups into that resin, the value goes up to £1,200 a ton. Once you turn it into a new product, such as the reusable cup, then the values go up to £30,000 a ton. The economics here shows you that recycling can actually stimulate the economy. When the company gets to work in the US, it wants to use the product to help build up better infrastructure for collecting and recycling cups locally.
