Environment – Small cup – big change

Along with the standard New Year’s resolutions, often come thoughts about what we could do to leave our planet a little better off and I’m here to tell you that it could be as simple as changing your takeaway coffee habits. 

The Packaging Forum estimates that, in New Zealand, 295 million beverage cups end up in landfills yearly, roughly equating to every adult in the country throwing away a single-use cup every five days. Something completely and easily avoidable that we could change instantly.

Sure there are much bigger fish to fry, but every person has a role to play and just because some have more to tackle than others, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do what we can. A quote I go back to when looking to put things in perspective is ‘You can’t do all the good the world needs, but the world needs all the good you can do.’ Getting a $6.50 reusable coffee cup from The Warehouse and keeping it handy in the car is something most of us can do.

‘But my local has switched to compostable cups,’ is something I hear a lot and unfortunately, while that is a small step in the right direction, it is far from being a sustainable solution to our wasteful habits. For starters, compostable cups still use a lot of resources, usually made of paper and bioplastic as a liner so that they can hold liquid. Those are all resources that need growing, harvesting, manufacturing, packaging and shipping, all to only be used once and then thrown away. Which brings us to the composting part. There is no current New Zealand certification standard for industrially compostable products and the difference between a product being industrially or commercially compostable and home compostable is very important. Most “compostable” coffee cups don’t have a hope of breaking down in our backyard compost – they need temperatures of 55°C or higher, as well as the right balance of oxygen and microbiology which are not found in landfills. So unless the compostable coffee cups end up in commercial compost collection bins, they are like any other piece of rubbish buried in our landfills.

The good news is that the best solution is something simple that already exists. Imagine you usually buy two coffees a week but you switch to a reusable coffee cup instead. Two times a week multiplied by 52 weeks a year, multiplied by say an office of 30 people is 3120 single-use items that have not ended up in landfill because of one simple action in one workplace. Many cafés are jumping on board and providing solutions, like UYO.co.nz where you can search for cafes that offer mug libraries (like Drifter Café in Ōrewa) and cafés that use systems like Againagain where you can loan and return cups to other participating cafés. Every small thing adds up and the collective impact of changing our individual behaviours drives demand and wider change.

Estefania (Stef) Muller Pallarès joins our Environment columnists. She is a proud Coastie. Adventuring in Shakespear Park, and climbing trees at local beaches after school are not only some of her fondest memories, but perhaps what shaped her passion for making sure that future generations can experience nature the way she was able to. As a teenager, she bought second-hand clothes and up-cycled and sold them at markets, and at university, she convinced her flat to keep a worm farm and volunteered at tree plantings. “My family instilled in me the value of looking after our earth and living our values to the best of our abilities,” Stef says. “My interests at times felt different to those around me but I cherished it.”