Disposable cups are disposed of in mass and the most common type, used for coffee, are difficult to recycle. To put things into perspective, if an individual purchases a disposable cup every day, it will create roughly 9 pounds of waste per year. We don’t include recycling symbols on our paper cups. Single-use disposable beverage cups generate circa 4,000 tonnes of waste in Scotland each year; and single-use disposable beverage cups production and waste generates ~5,900 tonnes of CO2e/year in Scotland.

That’s because conventional, coated and compostable cups are all made from virgin paper. According to a study by Starbucks, each paper cup manufactured is responsible for 0.24 pounds of CO2 emissions.

The study found that each conventional single use coffee cup requires 0.58 litres of water to produce and has a carbon footprint of up to 60.9 grams of CO2e per cup. If you buy just one cup of coffee (or tea) in a disposable cup each day, in one year you will have created around 23 lbs of waste.

Simple steps like charges and environmental messaging could reduce the use of disposable coffee cups by 50 to 300 million per year, according to new research aimed at finding ways of reducing coffee cup waste. Number 1: The cup itself is made of paper, true. If we estimate that each person is in the office 190 days per year, and they buy and throw out one disposable cup per day, then we generate about 6,250 pounds of coffee cup waste per year. 9 pounds of waste multiplied by 324.2 million citizens (based on 2016 census) is nearly 1.5 million tons of waste annually. A little known fact about paper coffee cups is that they are coated on the inside with polyethylene plastic to prevent damage to the cups from hot beverages.

Because it comes in contact with food and recycled paper might pose a health risk, virgin trees have to be felled for every single disposable cup. Prevention measures could reduce coffee cup waste by 300m per year, says study. There has been a big push to find technological solutions to coffee cup waste, focusing on that plastic liner that makes cups hard to recycle. The revenue from the trial will go to fund a customer behaviour study by Hubbub on the effects of the charge, as well as to support other waste-reduction schemes across London. The Coffee Cup Problem • Billions of disposable coffee cups being used per year • ~2.5 billion cups (PCCG 2017) • But less than 1% is recycled ... –a charge for disposable cups (after price reduction!) This equates to 3 MILLION pounds of solid waste being generated and 6,000 metric tons of CO2 being generated. It is likely that the reduction would be even greater with a mandatory charge on disposable Around 40,000 single-use disposable beverage cup are littered in Scotland annually.

1; Recycling Advocates estimates that 50 MILLION disposable coffee cups are used in the Metro area per year. Results of a field experiment to reduce coffee cup waste. The vast majority of paper cups we use daily for takeaway drinks have a plastic lining in them that prevents to paper cup from becoming saturated and falling apart. That doesn't make it "green", though. Between contractors, employees, other federal employees and interns, we have about 1,050 people in our offices in New York, New Jersey and Puerto Rico. Likewise, they scored better in the human-health category for things such as toxic emissions, smog, and ozone depletion.