Most coffee cups–around 99.75%, by one U.K. estimate–end up in the trash. Now one design company is making some of them into new reusable coffee mugs.
“We’ve only got finite amount of resources on the planet, and it’s fairly essential that tomorrow’s product has to be made from today’s waste,” says Dan Dicker, a former product designer at Dyson who now runs Ashortwalk, the British company that created the reusable mug, called rCup. It’s available in the U.K. now, for £12 for a 12-ounce mug, and will likely come to the U.S. later this year.
The designers, who focus on making products from hard-to-recycle materials–like birdhouses made from plastic plant pots–started working on the project after requests from coffee retailers that are under increasing pressure to find solutions for the problem of single-use waste. Around 2.5 billion coffee cups are thrown out in the U.K. alone each year. Typical paper coffee cups have a plastic lining. To recycle them, you first need to separate the materials, which requires specialized equipment. In designing the process to make their new mug, the designers decided to use whole cups instead. After cleaning the cups, they’re shredded into tiny pieces and blended with recycled polypropylene to create a new resin; the long fibers of the paper help strengthen the new material. One standard-sized mug contains six former cups.The growing pile of coffee cup waste would be best served by a full switch to reusable mugs. But while single-use cups still exist, this type of solution–and other products that can be made from the same resin–could help divert those cups from landfills. The mug is designed to last at least 10 years, but when it wears out, it can be recycled via regular curbside recycling. “The big thing is to get the most use you can out of that material,” Dicker says.