Clean Up Your Coffee: Part 2

Degradable: Degradable is considered the worst for the environment. It describes a plastic that is designed to break up into smaller pieces which then become microplastics. Usually, this material is never composted to rejoin the earth’s natural soils.

Biodegradable: Biodegradable may sound like an environmentally friendly option. However, it isn’t much better than degradable. All it means is that it will eventually break down. This product, whilst breaking down, can still pollute our environment, where animals may mistake it for food or get entangled in it.

Compostable: Surely compostable is environmentally friendly right? Not necessarily! To dispose of compostable plastic properly, it must be sent to a certified industrial composting plant where it can take 9-12 months to decompose. These plastics require specific temperatures and chemical balances to be able to decompose which is why they need to be disposed of in a composting plant rather than at home. These plastics, if not disposed of correctly, end up in landfills, adding to the greenhouse gas emissions as they slowly rot.

Home-Compostable: Certified Home Compostable is the best possible plastic. This is a plastic you can compost in your back garden and expect it to have decomposed properly within 3-6 months. Home compostable products will generally carry a symbol that reads AS5810. To be able to use this symbol, suppliers are meant to have been independently reviewed. It is important to verify the legitimacy of items labelled as home-compostable through the correct levels of accreditations, as there may be misguiding labelling otherwise.

Where do I Dispose of my Coffee Cup?

One of the issues I have unfortunately come across while researching the different plastics used by different cafes across Sydney is that whilst many of them use Compostable plastic, they then don’t have a way to dispose of them to confirm that they will eventually go to an industrial composting facility. Despite clear efforts being made in this sense by the cafes, it ends up having no meaningful result given that they end up in landfills and still contribute to marine pollution when incorrectly disposed of.

This being said, I have come across a couple of initiatives being undertaken by some companies within Australia. 7Eleven, in partnership with Simply Cups has started a Cup Rescue Initiative where you can dispose of your coffee cups and lids, and they will be taken to a separate facility to be recycled and upcycled properly to avoid these products ending up in landfill. Simply Cups has diverted over 10 million cups, a great outcome.

As discussed in the blog post, Where can I Recycle or Dispose of my Item?, Recycle Mate has a map you can access Here, which shows you where you can recycle your coffee cups close to your location. 

Follow up on our social media to join our mission to keep learning about how and where to dispose of our coffee cups and help us as a nation reduce plastic waste.