10,000 coffee cups daily end up ‘on a big mountain of rubbish’

Looking at the chart of ‘coffee consumption by country’ at the World Population Review website – a slightly random chart, topped by Luxembourg and featuring such unexpected names as Belize and Laos in the top 10 – one finds Cyprus in 15th position.

Our annual consumption of 13.28kg of coffee per capita puts us in the world’s top 15, being nearly five times the figure of, for instance, the UK (admittedly a tea-drinking nation), which consumes 2.68kg per capita.

The proliferation of coffee shops on the island bears witness to the drink’s popularity. Unfortunately, there’s a snag: almost all of these shops, especially the big coffee chains, serve their coffee in single-use, non-reusable cups.

Precise numbers are hard to come by – but, for instance, staff at a busy Coffee Island shop visited by the Cyprus Mail estimated that they might sell about 200 coffees on an average day, including deliveries.

The spacious Caffe Nero in Engomi claimed a daily total of about 250 (which seems low) while, down the road, a small, newly-opened branch of Serious Black admitted to about 50-75 cups of java.

These are ballpark figures, but if we were to estimate 200 daily coffees for busier outlets and 50 for smaller ones, then multiply by the number of shops on the island – Coffee Island alone has 40 locations, Mikel 21, Coffeehouse 16, Caffe Nero 19, and so on – we’d surely end up with at least 10,000 cups of coffee being made, served, drunk and, inevitably, thrown in the trash every single day.

We say ‘inevitably’ – but of course, it’s not inevitable at all.

Contrast, for example, with Germany where – as Anastasia Korae, board president of Friends of the Earth Cyprus, told the Cyprus Mail – a business named ReCup supplies reusable cups (and reusable packaging in general) to coffee shops and the takeaway sector.

The scheme works smoothly, with minimal fuss. You buy your coffee, then dispose of the cup at one of 21,000 drop-off points, ranging from kiosks to petrol stations and even Ikea. The company then picks up the cups, cleans them, and returns them to coffee shops. Problem solved.  

 ReCup is privately funded, though the German government played a role in its establishment by passing the Reusable Packaging Act, compelling coffee shops to offer customers a ‘reusable alternative’.

That said, it does require the co-operation of the public. It wouldn’t work if, for instance, customers couldn’t be bothered to use drop-off points, and threw away the cups willy-nilly. In that sense, our problem in Cyprus is also a problem of mentality.

After all, even without ReCup-style infrastructure, reusable cups are widely available here. Coffee Berry recently ran a big campaign to promote them, with 50 cents from each sale (which is only €1.50) going to football charity ‘Goal sti Zoi’.

It makes sense, even beyond environmental concerns. Drinking coffee is usually a habit – most people have one at the same time every day, often from the same place – so taking your own cup or thermos is easily arranged. Yet hardly anyone does it.

A store manager at a large Mikel told the Cyprus Mail that not even one customer a day, on average, brings their own receptacle. The Caffe Nero staff reckoned it might be two or three a day, “mostly the morning crowd” on their way to work.

Worst of all, even dine-in customers usually sit drinking coffee out of plastic cups, adding to the waste being created. Korae believes policymakers could help here, by passing the equivalent of the German law – yet the shops insist that they do already provide a ‘reusable alternative’, at least as an option. It’s just that most people – except “some older people” who like to sit and chat over a proper porcelain cup, according to the Mikel manager – opt for plastic, finding it more convenient.

Actually, they might not even ‘opt’ for plastic. Even assuming that all dine-in customers are asked whether they’d prefer single-use or reusable, it’s entirely possible that most simply shrug and have no preference – and of course the shop, given the choice, will choose plastic. Again, it’s an issue of mentality, and most Cypriots thinking it’s not a big deal.

Yet it is a big deal. “I don’t consider this to be a small thing,” says Korae (who wrote an article last year on reusable packaging), “and I don’t consider it unimportant.”

It’s not just the waste itself – though it’s that as well. The ongoing scandal at Pentakomo waste-management plant shows what a tragic farce waste disposal is at the moment. Just think of 10,000 coffee cups every day ending up “on that big mountain of rubbish, for no reason at all,” says Korae grimly.

It’d be a shame even if the waste were recyclable – but of course it’s not, despite feeble claims of the cups being mostly cardboard. That they contain plastic is undeniable – and plastic isn’t just bad for the environment. It’s bad for our health.   

“Another worrying aspect,” she confirms, “is that the plastic gets swallowed and ends up in our body – because it’s been shown that these chemicals are endocrine-disrupting,” causing imbalance in the endocrine system.

It’s even worse when the plastic has been melted by hot coffee, “you’re definitely going to be eating that, and it’s not good for you. It’s been found everywhere [in the body]. Placenta, brain, everywhere”.

Admittedly, that’s the one aspect not entirely solved by reusable cups – but they do tend to be made of much higher-quality plastic, reducing the hazard, and of course they could be made of stainless steel or some other material. That kind of detail is a policy decision – if our policymakers would only get more involved.

Not that the problem can be solved by politicians; again, it’s a question of mentality. Korae recalls being in London and Brussels recently and encountering coffee shops in both cities that didn’t offer single-use packaging and demanded a deposit (£5 and €2, respectively) for the cup. They couldn’t do that here; the market isn’t ready, nor is the eco-friendly niche big enough to make it work.

Still, politicians could help – through incentives, investment schemes, low-interest loans for companies supplying the cups, and so forth. Above all, the message must go out that (as studies have shown) reusable packaging can be profitable for the business itself, because it doesn’t need to keep buying stock after the initial investment.

When it comes to the environment in Cyprus, some problems are more intractable than others. It’d be nice, for instance, if developers stopped ravaging natural landscapes to build hotels, but it’s unlikely to happen any time soon.

The problem of single-use cups in our coffee-loving nation, on the other hand, is frustrating precisely because it’s relatively easy to fix – if we’d only think about fixing it.