CupCycling™ with Costa Coffee

Interview with Ollie Rosevear, Head of Environment, Costa Coffee.

As the UK’s favourite coffee shop, Costa uses a lot of single-use cups and the challenge for us was that a number of people felt that these cups couldn’t or weren’t being recycled. So it was really important for us to find a solution that would enable us to ensure that they could and were being recycled in the UK.

So we started looking around to understand exactly how we could get coffee cups recycled in the UK, and we were introduced to James Cropper who were able to take these coffee cups, and turn them from coffee cups into some really great resources.

About 3 years ago about only 1 in 400 coffee cups were being recycled in the UK, but through partnership with James Cropper we’ve been able to move that statistic from 1 in 400 all the way to 1 in 20 already and we see a great future forward.

For us at Costa it’s really important that we work with brands that have sustainability right at their heart, and the great thing for me with James Cropper is that they are able to take what is essentially a single-use product and turn them into some great resource – from shopping bags for high-street chains to high end fashion brands and also the notebooks that we use in our own business.
It allows us to tell that story to our customers, to our teams and also the general public around how they can take the coffee cup and turn it into a great resource.

James Cropper are a really fantastic business, not only are they recycling coffee cups in Britain they are also driving innovation in the recycling space, and the great thing is that they also work in partnership not only with ourselves but across the supply chain to really drive a more sustainable future.