Don’t Be A Mug! Coffee Cup Initiative
Drifters Coffeehouse on Duke Street have joined together with Warrior on Waste, Lynne Lambourne to try and tackle the increasing amount of takeaway coffee cups and lids filling up our bins and/or ending up on the streets or in the river by coming up with a Don’t be a Mug. Use a Mug initiative.
Drifters are calling on residents to donate any old mugs to the coffeehouse and will be giving a discount on takeaway coffee served in a mug. You can then bring back the mug the next time you are passing. They are also giving a discount for going lidless on a takeaway cup.
16 billion cups are used for coffee every single year which leads to 6.5 million trees cut down, 4 billion gallons of water going to waste.
Lynne said, “Lets be really clear – any coffee cup that is provided by a coffee shop that says COMPOSTABLE is about as useless as a chocolate tea pot UNLESS that coffee shop collects them in, separates them from other waste and then gets them to the right recycling unit to be composted. The term compostable is misleading and some may say “greenwashing” as you can’t pop them on your compost heap they need specific industrial in-vessel composter units. If not collected in they add to landfill. When I recently did some tracking on river pollution for Exxpedition the river was full of coffee cups. Fighting the war on waste means a massive rethink and my @warriorsonwaste movement is here to help local businesses with ideas and support. I’m hoping this will extend across the town and mugs will be collected in and swapped between coffee shops. There’s no need to buy new mugs for these schemes, we all have cupboards full of mugs – being sustainable means using what we have.”
Talia and Millie from Drifters said, “Everyone including ourselves are fed up of seeing the town become trashy especially at weekends! There are so many single use coffee cups overflowing onto our streets that we must put our foot down and come up with a sensible solution that works for both business’ and customers.
“Our Mug amnesty came about when Lynne mentioned how the Aussies had set the trend so we thought why not bring it across the pond? People happily sit inside and share mugs so we thought why not take it outside? We will be charging people extra if people wish to use a takeaway cup and insist on a lid. We hope that other local business’ will follow suit and take responsibility as well as people’s money.”
“We also urge all locals to sign and share the CEE bill (Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill) which can be found on the Greener Henley Facebook page www.facebook.com/GreenerHenley. This bill, if adopted by our government would oblige current and future governments to work to keep the earths temperatures rise within 1.5 degrees Celsius, beyond which we risk runaway climate change.
