By Aoife Prunty

A new recycling system is making its way into Dublin’s coffee shops and now, Trinity. If you’ve been in the Arts Block recently you may have spotted a new bin specifically for your coffee cups. These bins have been popping up all over Dublin in the last couple of months and have now been introduced to Trinity as part of a final-year business capstone project by myself (Aoife Prunty) and Caitriona Dempsey. The new recycling system was designed by The Cup Collective with the goal of reducing the waste produced by single-use coffee cups and promoting more circularity with takeaway products. You may find yourself wondering why your coffee cup can’t just go in the normal recycling bin, but this everyday product is more complicated than you might think.

The Issue

Disposable coffee cups are made up of paperboard from virgin wood and a thin layer of plastic resin or polyethylene. This plastic layer is essential to prevent your coffee from leaking through the cup. Unfortunately, these two materials are difficult to separate in the recycling process and therefore result in large quantities of cups going to landfill. In fact, a 2018 study by mywaste.ie revealed that over 200 million disposable coffee cups are used in Ireland every year – that’s six cups every second! So what’s the solution?

The Cup Collective

When you put your coffee cup into one of these new bins, there are three separate sections; one for the cup, one for the lid, and one for any remaining liquid in the cup. Once the cup section is full, it is placed in a larger storage bin on site which is later collected by Panda Recycling.

Once the cups are collected, they are sorted, baled, and then shipped to the James Cropper paper mill in England. At the paper mill, pulpers are used to break down the cups and extract the valuable fibre they contain. This recovered paper fibre is then recycled into new paper products such as luxury packaging for brands like Selfridges, Burberry, Hallmark, and more.

Since their Dublin launch in October 2023, The Cup Collective has collected over 72,000 cups from locations such as Insomnia, Butlers, Bewleys, Applegreen, and McDonalds. Chairperson of the Irish Paper Packaging Circularity Alliance (IPPCA), Fearghal Carroll, states that “this initiative is changing behaviour and fostering circularity through separate collections” and predicts that the Cup Collective will collect 219,500 cups annually across participating sites.

Trinity Launch

We launched in Trinity on the Monday of Green Week 2024 and the bins have been filling up quickly since then! There is one bin located outside of the Perch cafe in the Arts Block and the other is up the steps from the Perch, opposite the Lecky library entrance. By introducing this system in Trinity we hope to drastically reduce the number of single-use coffee cups entering our general waste bins. 

The launch came at an interesting time as the Perch went single-use free for Green Week, but this initiative gave us an interesting insight. We had previously assumed that a large portion of single-use cups being disposed of on our campus were from coffee shops outside of Trinity, and the selection of cups we collected confirmed this assumption! This was an important insight as although Trinity’s cafes are making great strides towards going single-use free, there are large numbers of students, staff and tourists on our campus everyday who bring waste with them from external sources. By implementing the Cup Collective on our campus we have been able to further reduce the amount of waste going to landfill, and after three weeks, we have already collected over 300 cups! 

We are excited to see this initiative grow and for our college community as well as our 1.5 million annual campus visitors to think before throwing away their coffee cup. 

This project would not have been possible without the help of many different people including Jane Hackett, David Hackett, Fearghal Carroll, Trinity’s housekeeping and catering teams, and more.For more information check out https://thecupcollective.eu/ and https://www.jamescropper.com/about/innovation/coffee-cup-recycling