Bring your own cup

Coffee cups are estimated to be the second-largest contributor to litter waste after plastic bottles. It is estimated Australians use 1 billion disposable coffee cups each year. Disposable coffee cups, which look like they are made of paper, have been found to contain plastics that do not break down and are damaging to the environment. Truly recyclable cups are being made, but this option comes at a price and not all cafe owners are willing to wear that cost in reality. Whether a plastic-coated paper cup is recyclable varies from area to area, with some local councils accepting coffee cups as part of their recycling process, while others exclude them and dump them in landfill. By the time the materials of these cups break down, they are m to be suitable for using in compost. However composting is not widely available in Australia, so cups are put in household or community compost. Most compo-stable coffee cups still end up in landfill. Biodegradable involves using an additive in the oil-based plastic lining which will break down when deprived of oxygen. But the scientific evidence has not sufficiently proven that this does in fact work.

By bringing our own mug to the office or coffee shop, we can avoid contributing to the tens of billions of disposable coffee cups that get tossed each year. This single-use cup habit is a contributor to a serious waste problem that speaks volumes about not only our own decadent lifestyle, but also about our disposable mindset, where everything can be "thrown away" somewhere else, or is "recyclable" which often gets interpreted as being somehow more eco-friendly, regardless of whether it actually does get recycled or not. Making that single change to our daily habits of bringing our own mug with us could have a positive impact on our personal waste stream.

We can cut out as many disposable cups as possible from our personal waste stream each year by doing practical things that we can do to reduce coffee cup landfill that will not mean totally giving up on our daily coffee ritual; by drinking coffee from ceramic cups at the cafe, bringing our own reusable cap, refusing a lid when we must use disposable when reusable cup left at home or work.

Source- https://www.youtube.com/user/NewOnABCTV
Image Source- https://twitter.com/owncup

Comments

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