You’ve just had soup for lunch, or perhaps coffee for breakfast. You’re left with an empty cup, seemingly made out of cardboard, which can’t be used again. So what do you do with it?
If you’re like me, they stack up on your desk, a wavering tower of guilt. It’s about time I did something about them, actually, so rather than spout another ream of green-tinged paragraphs, I thought I’d investigate if there’s an environmentally friendly way of clearing these cups from my desk…
Pret’s official website is a good start. Pret’s admirably progressive, and also good at communicating with woolly world-worriers like me. Some exploration turns up the ‘Pret Sustainability‘ page. Pret, it proclaims, “doesn’t believe in long-winded eco policies that simply don’t ring true’. So what does it believe in?
Interestingly, Pret seems to have hit upon a great idea for recycling its waste. The coffee company will “soon launch recycling in most shops”, thanks to a green campaign Pret is calling ‘co-mingled’ recycling. Which isn’t as vile as your average word-by-committee creation.
With co-mingled recycling “all product packaging can be placed in a single bin ready for sorting later at the recycling plant,” says Pret – which is fantastic news. Even local recycling schemes are limited by sorting difficulties. That’s why you’ll have trouble putting any plastics beyond commonly used drinks, medicine or toiletries bottles into your doorstep boxes.
I tried calling Pret’s commercial director, Simon Hargreaves, to ask about predictions – such as how much recycling did pret expect to be able to achieve? Except it appears he’s on holiday. I’ve left a wordy message for him, though, so hopefully I’ll be able to pick his brains in the near future.
But if Pret can do something about this mountain of discarded cups, there must be something we can do too. Pret’s site points toward an interesting London-based campaign I’d not heard of before, called Closed Loop. This admirable drive looks to cover the whole process of waste, from production to disposal. By offering advice as well as taking part in the recycling process itself, Closed Loop ought to make sustainability a fundamental part of everything we create and use.
Great, but I still don’t know what I’m going to do with my cups. Hopefully the website Recycle-More can help. Er, no – there’s no ‘coffee cup’ section, and I can’t see anything to do with recycling paper-based cutlery or the like. A quick Google search throws up info I already know, that these sorts of cups are coated, and so can’t be recycled like regular paper.
This is a great example of how we can’t simply expect people to recycle. Even greensters like myself can fail in trying to find environmentally friendly ways of dealing with the waste we produce – so how can I demand that other people take part in a process that they really don’t understand. We need educating, all of us, and we need it fast.
As for my stack of cups, for the moment it seems the only solution is dumping them in the bin. That said, the only positive solution is this – if you can’t recycle, then reduce. No more paper coffee cups for me. Even if I have to ship in my own lookalike ceramic coffee cups. Here’s hoping Pret get back in touch with some good news.
