COFFEE shops in Launceston and Bude are taking part in a nationwide cup recycling scheme.
Launched last week, the recycling scheme covers more than 2,000 Costa stores — including those in Launceston town square, Launceston Tesco, and at Belle Vue, Bude.
The scheme aims to recover and guarantee the recycling of any paper takeaway cup — from Costa or any of its competitors.
Once deposited at a Costa store, the cups will be collected by Costa team members and stored in cup racks, back of house.
Costa will then work alongside its waste partner, Veolia, to transport them to specialist waste processing plants. The scheme follows a trial, which took place across more than 45 stores in London and Manchester, during 2016.
Locally, the coffee chain has recently received criticism — The Post reported last week the attempts of David Perry to record littering on his camera.
He then sends the photographs to the relevant local authority’s refuse and recycling team, to try and highlight the problem.
He claimed the coffee chain’s takeaway cups ‘are not biodegradable’.
In response a Costa spokesperson said: “Litter is an important issue in the UK and Costa is committed to help tackle it as a business. We do this through our support of the Keep Britain Tidy Litter Prevention Commitment and enabling and encouraging our store teams to get involved with national litter campaigns such as ‘The Big Tidy Up’ and ‘Clean for the Queen’. We also encourage stores to engage with regular local litter campaigns within their area.
“As part of our ongoing commitment to the issue of litter and recycling we have this week launched our in-store recycling scheme across over 2,000 of our stores.
“The scheme encourages all customers to leave or return their takeaway cup to a Costa store for recycling via our partner, Veolia. We are also asking for takeaway cups from competitors.
“In order to encourage the use of reusable cups we also now offer our customers 25p off any handcrafted hot or cold drink when they use a reusable cup in store.
“We continue to review the current design and recyclability of the materials our cups are made of and are testing a number of new cup concepts.”
l What do you think? Will the scheme help the litter problem? What else could be done?
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