Selecta UK and Veolia roll out on-site paper cup recycling scheme with upcycling potential

12 Aug 2019 --- Selecta UK, under Switzerland-headquartered Selecta, a leading European self-serve coffee and convenience food retailer, has announced the launch of the new SelectaGreen Cup Recycling Service “for the workplace and on-the-go.” The new scheme aims to provide an easy and cost-effective way for Selecta vending customers across the UK to recycle their paper coffee cups through a service that guarantees cups are collected from premises and responsibly recycled.

The initiative, developed in conjunction with UK environmental solutions provider Veolia, will see the paper cups transformed into “high-end” fiber goods, such as packaging for perfumes and colognes, shopping bags and luxury notepads. On-site recycling solutions have been piloted by other major brands, such as Evian, who earlier last July trialed an initiative to ensure that every rPET bottle disposed at the Wimbledon 2019 UK tennis championship was retrieved and recycled.

Selecta vending customers who sign up for its scheme will receive a SelectaGreen Cup Recycling box which, when full, will be collected by Veolia within 48 hours of a request being received. The SelectaGreen recycling box is replaced at the customer site and the cups taken to Veolia’s facility in Essex. Veolia then undertakes a further separation process to guarantee all rogue items have been removed before arriving at a specialist UK pulping plant. None of the materials used for SelectaGreen go to landfill, Selecta maintains.

The initiative will see the paper cups transformed into “high-end” fiber goods, such as packaging for perfumes and colognes, shopping bags and luxury notepads.SelectaGreen will be available to more than 10,000 customers across the UK offering a “dramatic increase” in recycling opportunity, Selecta highlights. The brand asserts that its scheme will ensure “millions of cups a week” can be collected for processing in the paper pulp manufacturing industry. The scheme is particularly poignant, Selecta notes, given the growing scale of coffee cup waste combined with the industry’s lack of infrastructure to deal with it.

“The recycling of a paper coffee cup is a complex process,” notes Emily Stoten, Marketing Director of Selecta UK. “Whilst our cups can already be recycled, we recognize that it isn’t always easy for our customers to do this due to supply chain challenges, particularly when they are not based in city centres.”

Statistics have revealed that that 2.5 billion cups are thrown away in the UK every year with less than one percent recycled. The data in a Parliamentary Report published by MPs on the Environmental Audit Committee shows that the UK produces 30,000 metric tons of coffee cup waste each year, and just one in 400 cups are recycled – less than 0.25 percent. In 2018, a report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Eunomia Research & Consulting suggested that the UK is set to throw away a third more single-use coffee cups by 2030.

“This is a serious issue and we have approached it responsibly with the aim of producing a sustainable scheme that yields results reducing waste to landfill and helping our customers achieve their sustainability objectives,” says Stoten.

With distribution points spanning far distances, posing limited access to recycling points, a significant challenge for Selecta has been to retrieve their consumer’s cups. “With this scheme we have chosen the easiest route to make sure the highest possible volume of cups are dealt with,” explains Stoten. 

“Since we launched this scheme in 2017, Veolia has already diverted more than 60 million cups from energy recovery and landfill. We look forward to improving these green credentials further with our new partner,” concludes Keith McGurk, Regional Director for Veolia.

Convenience in recycling
Elevating the ease of recycling for consumers is a high-yielding investment. The single-use coffee cup issue was tackled by The NextGen Consortium, convened by Closed Loop Partners, in the NextGen Cup Challenge, which facilitates the innovation of reusable cup service models. The consortium highlights a key potential to turn the 250 billion fiber to-go cups used annually from waste into valuable material in the recycling system.

In April, Starbucks partnered with UK environmental charity Hubbub to launch a £1m (US$1.3m) fund that will spearhead cup recycling initiatives in the UK. The grants to be given range from £50,000 (US$65,600) to £100,000. The Cup Fund is financed by Starbucks, which introduced a 5p (US$0.07) charge on paper cups in 2018, to encourage customers to increase their use of reusable cups and avoid the charge. The Cup Fund aims to support at least 10 large-scale recycling programs in locations across the UK, each with the goal to develop long-term infrastructure and ensure all cups are collected and sent for recycling.

Innova Market Insights has identified “Recyclable by design” as its number one trend in packaging for 2019. Widespread bans on single-use plastics, the implementation of China’s “National Sword” policy and increasing media attention around the environmental scourge of plastic pollution have intensified the demand for recycle-ready packaging solutions. Innova Market Insights labeled 2018 “a sustainability tipping point for packaging” and fully expects the industry to respond with innovative, recyclable designs across 2019.

By Benjamin Ferrer