It really is time we ditched the disposable caffeine habit! I don’t mean give up on coffee but we should stop using single-use cups.

It might not seem a big thing, this little cup holding your hot drink. However, have you ever thought about what happens to it once you’ve enjoyed your flat white? A take-away cup might seem like it’s paper… or is it cardboard? Well if you think about it, it can’t just be paper or card otherwise your coffee would seep through as you sip! Though they are largely made of paper, disposable cups are lined with plastic polythene which is tightly bonded to the paper making the cups waterproof and so able to hold liquid. So, where do you put them to be recycled? As they are a mix of plastic and paper you can’t put them in your kerbside recycling or any of the recycling bins in town or on the seafront. The majority end up in the bin, although Costa Coffee will accept cups returned to any store for recycling.

Throwing your take-away cup away might not seem like a problem, especially if you are doing the right thing and putting it in a bin. However, 2.5 billion coffee cups are thrown away every year in the UK, enough to stretch around the world roughly five and a half times. Just 0.25% of disposable cups are recycled. Each conventional coffee cup requires 0.58 litres of water to produce and has a carbon footprint of 60.9 grams of CO2 per cup. This may not sound much per cup but multiply this by UK usage and we are using 1.5 billion litres of water and emitting 152 million kgs of CO2 just to make coffee cups, to be used for 20 minutes and thrown away! This makes no sense!

However, like I said earlier, I’m not asking you to give up coffee just to switch from single-use. This is easy, just use a reusable cup. This can be in the form of a reusable take-away cup or simply sitting down in a café. At the start of the pandemic many places stopped accepting customer’s reusable cups and many café’s switched from regular crockery to disposable cups. However, we know so much more about the virus now and over 100 scientists say it’s safe to use reusable containers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Sadly, many cafes have not switched back to reusable cups. This doesn’t mean we have to buy coffee in them, I haven’t used any single-use coffee cups since 2017 and that includes during the pandemic.

So, here’s a run-down of where I’ve been getting my caffeine fix:

For take-away coffee I’ve bought from Cabin Coffee House in the Strand, Exmouth and The Gingerbread House in Budleigh. I’ve heard that Hangtime Café on Exmouth seafront and Café Nero accept reusable cups but I haven’t been there. The Boston Tea Party in Exeter and Honiton continue to only serve take-away coffee in reusable cups.

I’ve enjoyed many lattes in The Point on Exmouth Marina and Greenvalley Nursery Sheds in Ebford and Chapples tea hut on Beer beach serve tea in real mugs! I’m sure there are more places, I haven’t been out much! Just check what cups they are using before ordering.

Just a quick word on compostable coffee cups. Some businesses are using these and I would say they are better than the standard single-use cups because they are plant-based, made from renewable materials rather than fossil fuels being taken out of the ground (where they need to stay) to create the plastic lining of standard cups. However, these cups will not simply break down in your home compost bin; they need an industrial composter. Currently there isn’t any local infrastructure for this. The café that sells coffee in these cups would have to collect them back in and send them to an industrial composter. This is hardly convenient for customers who are having a take-away coffee which will often be taken away! Plus every local business I’ve asked about this does not collect their compostable cups back, so customers simply throw them away! The answer is reusable cups, every time. www.rhubarbandrunnerbeans.co.uk

Information sourced from The Independent, Plastic Free North Devon, foodanddrink.scotman.com and The Guardian.