Ever since Hugh FernleyWhittingstall waged a war on waste in his BBC show, disposable coffee cups have been living on borrowed time. These cups, offered up by major chains and small, independent coffee shops around the world have come to symbolise the modern trend for creating endless waste that has long-term environmental damage. Single-use coffee cups have been around for a long time, and the latest iterations are made with a polyethylene (PE) lining – a plastic that takes around 450 years to fully break down. Added to that, PE is a by-product oil, derived from crude oil or natural gas, a finite resource. The environmental impacts are damaging both through production and after their use. My work focuses on the challenges and opportunities we face when it comes to replacing the PE lining. I work with a PhD colleague in Lancaster’s Chemistry department, who is working on the science, while I look at how the implementation of newmaterials would reach the market, and the potential barriers involved. CONVENIENT, BUT NOT GREEN The current PE-lined version of the coffee cup is popular mainly in Global North countries, where a focus on health and hygiene made single-use products the preferred option over the last century. Aligned with the popularity of fast food, convenience of eating in cars, and coffee shops – influenced by, among other things, the smash US TV hit Friends, where the central characters are often to be found occupying the comfortable chairs and sofas of Central Perk, and the expansion of Starbucks – the current version of PE-lined coffee cups ensured drinks could be enjoyed on-the-go, offering convenience and keeping consumers safe fromspillages etc. However, in the mid-2010s, environmentalists noted how these cups were difficult to recycle, with most ending up in landfill, and others littering towns and the countryside, causing problems as the cups take centuries to decompose due to the plastic lining. After Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall highlighted the problem, it triggered the UK Parliament to hold a review about the waste fromsingle-use cups. They estimated that 2.5 billion cups are sent to landfill each year in the UK. Over the last few years, many big brand coffee chains started to take steps to reduce the number of single-use cups they offered, including encouraging customers to use reusable cups, or take 32 |
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTI5NzM=