Conor Horgan

They have become a significant problem.

I think not enough people are using the refillable cups.

We survey towns and cities across the country several times a year for their litter levels.

And we're finding that in, look, we survey about 600 sites in total.

And a site might be a car park, it might be a river walk, it might be a street.

we're finding coffee cups in over 20% of those sites.

And that has been a consistent figure for the last five years.

We might have thought this born of COVID might have died off, but clearly our behaviour in terms of consuming coffee has stayed the way it was from COVID.

And with that, we're seeing lots of coffee cup litter on the ground.

Correct.

I mean, litter is only half the problem here, obviously.

The other problem is how to dispose correctly of these items when you really only have a general waste bin.

But no, we're talking specifically about the blight that they are on our landscape.

Well, it's totally unnecessary.

I mean, I am personally, my every day involves going down for a coffee to the local coffee shop and I have my backpack and I have my refillable cup and I hand it over and I consume my coffee in the park and go home and put it in the dishwasher.

And that happens every day.

And that's clearly saving hundreds of cups every day, every year.

But I see so many people where coffee is part of their routine and I see them in the park with a different single use cup every month.

But they have no means of composting that properly in reality.

I mean, I see them then, they drop it in disposable waste, sorry, in the waste bin where it's mixed in with all other waste.