A LAUNCESTON bakery and coffee shop has taken the decision to stop providing paper takeaway coffee cups, and is encouraging customers and other independent businesses to think about how they could reduce their consumption of harmful materials.

Phil and Suzanne Hiscott, owners of the Little Bakehouse at Launceston, have taken the decision to no longer stock and provide coffee in paper takeaway cups — instead pointing their coffee-loving customers to their newly stocked reusable hot drinks cups, made from bamboo and being entirely compostable.

The takeaway cups, which are now being phased out in the shop, were ‘EdenWare’ and biodegradable. However, Phil told the Post that they have since discovered that only a very small percentage of these cups are recycled as one would hope, with the vast majority going straight to landfill.

He said: “In a nutshell, we’ve taken the decision to stop our takeaway cups based on all the information that’s been provided to us by various environmental action groups, and various things happening on the high street. I personally don’t believe that doing things like offering a discount when a customer brings in their own cup to buy one cup of coffee will do enough for this issue.

“So we sat down one day and just went over everything. The cups we have provided are EdenWare, and are labelled as biodegradable and compostable. But we found that customers would come in and weren’t bringing their reusable cups with them, they’d say they’d left it in the car and so on. We’re basing this decision on the Bags for Life thing, because now it’s just what you do when you go shopping, you bring bags that last.”

Phil and Suzanne have also based their decision on the figures that have been revealed in regards to waste. “If you look at the astronomically scary figures (of cups) going to landfill, it’s just not acceptable. We’re not going to get any further if we don’t make some changes. We just need to say, enough is enough, it’s time to be more efficient, because unless we break this cycle, we’re not going to get anywhere.”

Phil has found that a measly one per cent of biodegradable cups end up in the correct recycling systems, but said the vast majority go straight to landfill, adding to the ongoing issue surrounding plastics and harmful waste. “We’re not doing a cup discount,” Phil continued. “I just don’t think that’s enough. We need to be encouraging people to stop picking up harmful products and filling massive holes with paper.

“We’re now providing reusable Ecoffee cups, which are made from bamboo — a cup for life. We’re looking at most things across the board. We also do a lot of takeaway soups, which are served in cartons, so we’ll be looking to phase these out too eventually, although I haven’t come up for a solution for these just yet.”

Phil commended the work of high street chain Boston Tea Party, which is the first larger chain to phase out takeaway cups completely. He told the Post that there are around 100-million paper cups that go to landfill in the UK, adding: “That’s a grotesque number of wasted paper cups.

“If we do something little, it all adds up. As an independent business, more of us need to be doing this so it puts more pressure on bigger corporations to make a change — not just with coffee cups, but across the board.”