From:Packaging News

Frugalpac has warned that coffee cup recycling initiatives will not address the scale of the problem nationwide.

The Square Mile Challenge is led by Simply Cups and Hubbub which will introduce coffee cup collection facilities across the City’s square mile.

The initiative aims to collect half a million cups per month; however, 200 million cups are used every month in the UK.

Martin Myerscough, Frugalpac chief executive, said: “Frugalpac welcomes any initiative that highlights the issue that only 1 in 400 paper cups is currently recycled. However, we need an effective universal solution. While a new collection system for picking up used cups to be recycled may go part of the way to reducing our coffee cup waste, it is only likely to make a small dent in the 2.5 billion cups which go to landfill in the UK each year.”

There are currently only two sites in the UK that can recycle conventional paper cups, which means less than 1% of used paper cups actually gets recycled.
“We need to tackle the problem head on. Using a fully recyclable cup is the only viable solution to reduce coffee cup waste on a mass scale.”

Frugalpac said its cups are made from recycled paper which is formed into a cup first without adding any chemicals to the paper.  A thin preformed plastic liner is lightly bonded into the paper cup. When the cup goes to the standard paper mills it easily separates from the paper in the recycling process.