In Ireland, a new cup recycling system will launch in restaurants and coffee shops at the start of 2020. Zeus Packaging partnered up with UK recycling firm DS Smith to develop this system. So far, 80 outlets of the O’Briens sandwich chain and the Bagel Factory have signed up for the new system.
Brian O’Sullivan, chief executive at Zeus, said:
This is the solution to the problem of every coffee cup in Ireland – a complete, closed-loop system which has the capacity to recycle every type of paper coffee cup from every coffee shop, office, or workplace.
O’Sullivan claims that if all food and drink outlets using paper cups adopted this system, it would result in about 200 million single-use cups that generally get thrown away to be recycled instead.
DS Smith designed the collection of recycled paper packaging boxes, in which consumers can discard their used cup in at the cost of 7c a cup. The boxes can store up to 700 cups, once full, Zeus stores them until a complete shipment can be transported to DS Smith’s recycled paper mill, in south-east England.
Graeme Beere, whose fast-food franchise group AIL, owns the O’Briens and Bagel Factory brands, explained:
We encourage all our customers to use these boxes to dispose of their coffee cups so that they can be correctly recycled instead of going to landfill.
In September, DS Smith’s strategic development director, Tom Campbell-White, launched the cup recycling boxes in the UK and is aiming to recycle 2.5 billion cups each year at its Kent mill. Campbell-White expressed that he is “really excited to work with Zeus on providing a recycling solution for Ireland’s coffee lovers.”
According to O’Sullivan, Ireland lacks the ability to recycle its disposable cups. Zeus Packaging and DS Smith are providing that infrastructure to Ireland by bringing them “the cup recycling boxes” solution.
