Circular economy principles in everyday habits: coffee cups

Coffee cups collected from high street brands, processed by James Cropper Paper Mill, created by Hallmark, sold in Waitrose

Coffee cups- an example of circularity

It was a friend’s birthday in May this year and I was delighted to find a birthday card in Waitrose that proudly displayed a tag that said ‘I used to be a coffee cup’. Needless to say, I purchased it.

Since 2016 I seem to have become part of a select group of disposable coffee cup experts! Ever since Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall brought the issue of disposable cup waste to the nation’s attention in his 2016 programme War on Waste, disposable cups had been on the agenda both for meetings I had with clients and within the business I was working.

As the story broke, it was obvious we had to do something. I contacted Professor Wouter Poortinga at Cardiff University who had recently completed work on the impact of the carrier bag charge. He’s a Professor of Environmental Psychology, specialising in behaviour change. We agreed to partner together and formulated a plan for a small field study to look at what drivers would influence behaviour change to increase the use of reusable cups over disposable. The field study ran in several universities and offices in London.

The results of the study gained traction with the media who saw disposable cups as a clear manifestation of everything that is wrong with our linear packaging flow of take, make, dispose. This was supported by evidence from The Ellen MacArthur Foundation which suggests that 95% of all plastic packaging material value is lost after its first use cycle. Our evidence was submitted to the Parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee as part of its research in to the environmental damage caused by plastic drinks packaging.

It became obvious that there would be two broad approaches to addressing the issue, industrial behaviour change and consumer behaviour change.

There are traditionally 6 levers you can pull to influence behaviour change (according to Vlek 2000). Provide alternatives (reusable cup), economic incentives (the much-mooted latte levy), information campaigns (bring your own reusable cup messaging), values and moral change (shame those who use disposable) and social modelling (leading by example). The final of the 6 is an outright ban.

We knew from our study, that addressing each of the issues above was not enough to drive radical change, so we returned to habit theory. This theory suggests that habits are borne from Repetition, Automaticity and are Context- Cued. In theory, the habit you adapt is triggered by the context. In order to change these habits we needed to disrupt three things:

1.      Disrupt the frequency

2.      Disrupt the automaticity

3.      Disrupt the context (ual cues)

We also knew we had to make it easy for customers to make the change to using disposable (e.g., removing barriers to rinsing cups), we had to ensure messaging was communicated well, we fundamentally needed to remove the need for the items and we needed to reduce use. Finally, this had to be backed up with public endorsement: look how many disposable cups have been prevented from going in to landfill – be part of the solution!

From an industrial behaviour point of view, we knew industry would be part of the solution. James Cropper and Ace UK already had facilities to repurpose coffee cups, turning them in to fine art paper, high grade paper bags and industrial cardboard tubes.  D S Smith recycling was also soon able to repurpose coffee cups in the South East. We engaged clients with these companies through visits to paper mills and recycling facilities so they could see the potential of repurposing the material and keeping it in the circular economy. Meanwhile the university sector was experimenting with deposit return schemes, some businesses we knew in London were banning disposables and only offering reusables or crockery. Collection systems were springing up to collect used disposable cups, sending them to be sorted and then repurposed. The PCRRG (Paper Cup and Recovery Group) was coordinating efforts and results to ensure that all learnings could be shared across the industry and city -wide schemes to reduce disposable cup use were being unveiled in Leeds (by Hubbub) and in Glasgow (through the Glasgow Cup Movement).

During the Leeds experiment over 600,000 cups were recycled. In the 4 universities that I included in a presentation to TUCO Conference (The University Caterers Organisation) over 250k cups had been saved from landfill through DRS schemes and reuse. Overall, according to numbers from the PCRRG recycle rates for disposable cups increased from 1:25 in 2018 to 1:12 in 2019 (expected).

Company commitment to the problem, tangible targets and the adoption of theories to support change can lead to fantastic results. For me, seeing that birthday card, made using a proportion of coffee cup waste was the culmination of a huge amount of industry wide effort over the last 4 years to repurpose everyday waste in to a product with a second life.

As we emerge from COVID lockdown, there have been many discussions about the safety of reusable cups in coffee shops. Bristol based campaigning organisation City to Sea have provided some very sensible guidance showing how reusable cups can be used.

We must continue with our focus on circular economy but also on reducing what do use. It is our combination of reduce, reuse, repurpose and recycle that is the only way to protect our finite resources and protect further environmental damage. For that, we all need to take responsibility.

The full academic research paper can be found here