Don't let your takeaways go to waste

By Kate Hodal It's unlikely that you've thought much about where your coffee cup goes once you've drunk its contents and tossed it into the bin because, really, why would you? You order a coffee, it's handed to you in a heat-resistant receptacle, you drink it, wake up a bit, and then bin it.

But an astonishing 31 billion cups of coffee are handed out across the UK every year - equating to each person in the British isles drinking, and then binning, over 500 cups of coffee within 365 days. That's nearly a cup and a half of coffee every day, for every person, over a year.

That's quite a lot of coffee. And quite a lot of rubbish as a result, most of which goes straight to landfill.

And that's not even touching on the sandwich boxes, soup cartons or salad containers that we also buy for lunch, eat at our desks, and then throw away. So where is all this stuff going, and can any of it be helped?

:: RETHINKING OUR DAILY HABITS Coffee houses across the country like Pret A Manger, EAT, and Starbucks - not to mention popular lunch hotspots like Marks & Spencer - have certainly tried to cut down on their waste.

Biodegradable and compostable sandwich boxes - many made out of recycled cardboard - recyclable salad containers, and bags for life all help us to be more eco.

While that's all well and good, it's unlikely that there are recycling facilities that can accommodate the recyclable material that comprises our lunches.

How many offices actually help employees recycle their drinks bottles and compostable sarnie boxes? And let's face it - who among us actually rinses out their salad container and takes it home to recycle?

So it was with glee that I saw my local Pret A Manger had completely reformatted its binning system.

Gone were the large bins for general waste, and in their place were three separate bins - one for any and all packaging, another for food waste, and yet another for liquids. Little arrows explain the change and where to put things.

Just as I was about to commend Pret on a job well done, a customer - without even noticing the new bins - threw his coffee and half-eaten sandwich straight into the packaging-only recycling section and ran out the door.

His unthinking action made the recycling worthless, as food scraps and liquid contaminate the recyclable materials. But this is something that Nicki Fisher, the sustainability manager been behind Pret's recycling overhaul, thinks will take a bit of time to change.

"This has been our biggest challenge to date - getting the rubbish separated properly and getting customers to understand what goes where," she says.

"We had a six-week trial and, at first, people just threw things into any hole they saw fit. But getting team managers and staff to talk to our customers about how the recycling works has helped a lot."

:: GETTING IT RIGHT Ironically, it was customers themselves who wanted to see Pret recycling its 6,000 tonnes of cans, plastic bottles, cardboard sandwich boxes and general packaging.

"A major complaint from our customers was that we had too much packaging and no recycling facilities," Fisher says.

"As we're the first food retailers on the high street to be doing something like this, it's been hard to get help and advice on how to set it up. But since the new bins, we've only had praise."

Pret's recycling scheme is called co-mingling - whereby all the packaging (cans, paper, plastic) is put into one bin and sorted later at the recycling plant. But making sure that all those items are free from food and liquid waste is key to the recycling process - and that's exactly what customers aren't catching onto.

"I've heard it's been an absolute nightmare over at Pret," says Anne Bibbings, brand manager at EAT, a cafe chain with nearly 100 stores across the UK.

"That's why we're taking our time exploring the best options for recycling from a practicality point of view at EAT. We make sure that all our packaging is recyclable and our hot pie boxes are now compostable - but we're using this as a first instance to see how effective it is or isn't."

EAT has recently introduced a Bag for Life in stores and has a reputation for using paper rather than plastic packaging. Now it's planning to tackle the non-recyclability of its coffee cups by stripping out the plastic coating in the cardboard pulp, and reusing that pulp to make new coffee cups and soup containers.

Most of the 31 billion coffee cups sold every year in the UK end up in landfill due to that waxy interior, which tends to contaminate the natural (and reusable) wood pulp in most recycling plants. Unless, of course, the plastic coating is water-based like Pret's, and dissolves during the recycling process.

:: RECYCLING IS EVERYONE'S PROBLEM While it might have taken three years of hard work to get Pret's recycling bins up and running at nearly all 180 of its stores, many of the cafes where we regularly buy our coffees, sandwiches and salads aren't actually places where we sit down to eat.

Fisher says that means the problem of recycling doesn't rest entirely with the businesses selling us coffees.

"Eighty per cent of all our food and drink is taken out of our stores," she says.

"The customers who are getting takeaway lunches should ask those eateries to provide recycling facilities in-store and, when they go back to their offices to eat, ask their managers to install recycling facilities in their building.

"Our customers expected us to do something about it and we did - so it proves it can be done."

M&S and Pret currently work with a company called Closed Loop Recycling [www.closedlooprecycling.co.uk], which runs an office recycling scheme and also recycles drinks and milk bottles back into food-grade plastic.

But Fisher says more money and more clarity is needed to help businesses get greener - and that help should come from the Government.

"We struggle to recycle even in the domestic area in this country," she says.

"So you can imagine in the commercial sector, with local authorities differing on budget and recycling schemes from borough to borough, and private companies being hired out to take care of the rest - just how impossible it is.

"We've spent half a million pounds making our stores recycle more, with no help whatsoever from the Government. I don't think that every other business has that resource - so if they want us to be more green, they need to help us."

:: A REUSABLE CUP Jiving for coffee but worried about where your waxy cup will end up? Then perhaps an investment in a double-walled, thermal ceramic mug would do you good. 'I'm Not A Paper Cup' has a re-sealable silicon lid that keeps hot bevvies safe. Not only will it stay warmer for longer, it could also save you money - many high street chains now offer discounts on coffee if you bring your own mug (Starbucks, for example, offers 25p off). See www.nigelsecostore.com or phone 0800 288 8970 for more information.