Let’s Break Down That Single Use Cup!
Going Throwaway Cup Free is Your Mission! Do you choose to accept?
Takeaway or disposable cups (SUC - Single Use Cups) are gradually being eliminated from hospitality vendors around the country, as the use of ‘keep cup’s has increased massively. Good on you Kiwi’s!
Most of us know by now that takeaway cups and service-ware are not doing us or our world any favours, but let’s break this issue down a little further. When it comes to takeaway cups, what are they really made from and what keeps the coffee inside? All disposable coffee cups have something more than paper present in their design. There are many reasons we encourage consumers to put down the Single Use cups in favour of the keep and reuse variety and we would like to share some right here. Each kind of takeaway cup presents different issues and we would like to focus on three different kinds….. keep reading!
REGULAR OIL BASED LINING - ‘PAPER’ COFFEE CUPS
Many paper cups have a PE lining. Using Polyethylene or other fossil-derived oils requires the continued extraction of fossil oil from the Earth, along with the harmful process of refining the oil and turning it into plastic. Extracting and refining oil and manufacturing plastic generates greenhouse gas emissions. To turn oil into plastic, chemical additives are used which enable the plastic resin to perform functions that are needed; like flexibility and thermal/heat resistance. Many of the chemical additives used to make plastic packaging could be (or are known to be) harmful to human health; including endocrine disrupting chemicals that basically mess with our hormonal systems. Companies are sadly not transparent about the additives they use to make their different plastic products, so it’s really hard to know whether they are safe or non-toxic. The lack of transparency also makes products really hard to regulate for safety.
Although PE is a reasonably recyclable plastic, when it’s used as a lining it becomes part of a composite product (i.e. a multi-material product). With cups, the PE is stuck to the paper/cardboard. Composite products are notoriously difficult to recycle; both the PE and the paper/cardboard become un-recyclable in a closed loop (at best, they might be down-cycleable - for example, one company in NZ reckons they can recycle coffee cups with Tetrapaks (another composite product) into construction material - but this doesn’t achieve the purpose of recycling, which is to stop the one-way extraction of raw materials to generate things like cups in the first place. True recyclability would be turning a cup into another cup or a different product entirely!
Given the difficulty of recycling or even collecting single-use cups, most of them end up heading to landfill or entering the ever-growing litter stream. Sad face! Even worse… the paper/cardboard element of the cup produces methane in the landfill’s anaerobic conditions.
PLA LINED PAPER CUPS
PLA is plastic, but the feedstock is plant-derived (usually sugar or corn) rather than fossil-derived. PLA or Poly Lactic Acid is also commercially compostable. It is common to assume that because PLA is a plant-derived plastic, it must be non-toxic. However, chemical additives are also required to turn the plants into plastic and perform the functions expected of plastic. These additives present the same potential toxicity issues as the chemical additives used for fossil-derived plastics. Some preliminary studies suggest that PLA might have higher baseline toxicity than some fossil-derived polymers.
PLA is not easily recycled plastic and is a major contaminant of PET recycling. Furthermore, as a lining, it just forms part of a composite product, which comes with the same problems as with the PE-lined cup.
In theory, the PLA cup is commercially compostable. However, the trick is getting the cups in any significant number to such a facility. In NZ we don’t have that many commercial compost facilities, we have virtually no commercial compost collection services for the public or hospitality venues. Furthermore, most commercial composts don’t accept PLA coffee cups because they are difficult to break down and add little value to the soil - they also reduce the quality of the final compost because PLA requires high temperatures to break down, which kills many of the beneficial microbes that are needed for a thriving compost. In addition to the practical difficulties of breaking down PLA, there is also the concern that the chemical additives that are used to manufacture it may lead to soil toxicity. Compostability certification standards do not test for the wide range of potential chemical additives in PLA (companies don’t disclose their ‘recipes’), so compostability certification is no guarantee that the products are non-toxic.
Composters take pride in their product and don’t want it to be contaminated by compostable plastics. Nor do they want it to be used as a waste disposal system for synthetic packaging. Most compostable plastic products like PLA-lined cups are manufactured without regard for or consultation with the composters who are expected to process them, or the councils who are expected to provide the collection service to take them to the composters.
WBD COATED PAPER CUPS
A relatively new sort of packaging is called ‘water-based dispersion coating’ (WBDC), based on a technology known as ‘aqueous polymeric dispersions. This is a coating that gets applied to fibres in order to create a liquid-proof barrier. Like PFAS this removes the need for fibre packaging to have a separate, solid plastic lining to stop liquids seeping through. WBDC technology is being touted by some as the future of sustainable food packaging. This is because many have recognised the problems and dangers of PFAS and see WBDC as the best alternative.
Fibre packaging treated with WBDC (like coffee cups and food containers) is claimed to be fully recyclable, compostable and even 100% plastic-free. Indeed, the packaging industry likes to emphasise the fact that they use a ‘water-based’ coating. Yay for water! But WAIT...Adding water to paper in order to repel more water...? We’re no detectives, but surely that doesn’t add up? Sounds like there might be a bit more going on than just water here...The dead giveaway is that little “based” bit in “water-BASED”. WBDC is a water solution (the base) that has grease and water-repellent polymers (and various other chemical additives) suspended in it.
A description of the resins that are typically invited to float around in WBDC is telling: “pure acrylic polymers, copolymers of acrylates such as ethyl acid acrylates and ethylene methacrylate, polyvinyl acetates, styrene-butadiene copolymers, and polyolefins.” It’s a who’s who of well-known plastic polymers. Do we really want to put this in our composts or worse, leaching into beverages we are consuming? As one study noted, when paper cups with WBDC go through industrial composting they “leave behind thermoplastic microparticles, which can still have an adverse environmental impact.” Compost this stuff and you are literally adding microplastics to the soil. Whatever we put in our soil can be guaranteed to end up in our crops…. and eventually our bodies! No thanks!
As if we didn’t need any more reasons to keep that reusable cup handy! Thankfully many cafe’s and coffee dispensary’s are employing the use of ‘mug libraries’ for those of us who forget our keep cups. This is an amazing initiative and the team at Res.Awesome are big fans! Various swap systems have emerged around the country too, with customers able to swap out a dirty cup for a freshy thanks to the hard working dishwashers at cafe’s around the country. Some cafe’s have free keep cups available in the form of glass jars - some even come with a cute hand-knitted cup cosy; we absolutely love the creativity and generosity we are witnessing around the country - Keep it up guys!
If you want to support the reuse system here in Ōtepoti check out our ReWash Truck and support us to create this for Dunedin too.
xxx
