Costa Coffee, the UK’s largest java retailer, is pledging to recycle half a billion single-use cups per year by 2020.
The initiative will make Costa Coffee the first ever coffee chain in the UK to commit to recycling the same volume of cups it puts onto the market, which will amount to roughly one fifth of the 2.5 billion takeaway coffee cups consumed as a nation each year.
Costa Coffee is going to achieve the ambitious goal by paying waste management companies to collect all the disposable coffee cups destined for the landfill and transport them to paper mills that can recycle the cups.
Though there are already three paper mills in the UK that are equipped to recycle paper, it has never been economically viable for the waste management companies to send them the cups. This means that all the paper products that could have been processed and reused either end up being incinerated or sent to a landfill.
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