Cup to bag?

Here at UKVending we simply love how innovators are taking a thorny issue and making good choices. The issue in question is what to do with the billions of worldwide coffee cups that cannot be properly disposed of.

Top retailer Selfridges have come onboard with the campaign to recycle more of these hard to process items with a new innovative to turn them into fashionable, useful, and functional bright yellow shopping bags.

Each bag contains around 20% cup fibre, which is roughly equal to one eight-ounce cup.

Around 2.5 billion paper cups are used annually in Great Britain and most of these have a polyethylene lining which makes them virtually non-recyclable at an affordable rate. Selfridges has been aware of its environmental footprint for years and has taken steps to improve it by working with paper manufacturer James Cropper to re-purpose the wastepaper cups into something more useful. James Cropper has at their paper plant machines that can strip the two components of the paper cups apart. They then reuse the paper fibre in the bag and safely dispose of the polyethylene.

Selfridges are the first High Street retailer to ‘up cycle’ paper cups in this manner as part of their ‘Buying Better – inspiring Change’ mantra.