When you grab a coffee on the go, chances are it's served in a paper cup. It feels like a greener choice compared to styrofoam, but lurking beneath that seemingly eco-friendly exterior is a problem: the lining. This thin layer of polyethylene (LDPE) or a plant based solution, such Polylactic acid (PLA), is essential for keeping your drink from soaking through the paper, but it also brings a host of environmental issues.
The Recycling Challenge
Paper cups with plastic and PLA linings are notoriously difficult to recycle. The mix of materials complicates the recycling process, as most facilities are not equipped to separate the paper from the lining. In the case of the PLA lined cup, they can be composted but only in very specific controlled conditions at an industrial facility. PLA also doesn’t biograde quickly and will remain in the environment (both land and sea) for hundreds of years.
As a result, many of these cups end up in landfills instead of being repurposed.
Waste Management and Disposal
So, neither the LDPE or PLA lined cups can go into paper recycling due lining contaminating the paper fibres. There is a small increase in the number of compost bins being placed around to help reduce the impact of the paper cups, but this does not help the issue of the plastic lined cups, which are visually identical to the PLA compostable ones.
Purposeful confusion?
There are so many different brands of cups available now and it can be really confusing due to the fact that there appears to be no rules, or at least very few, on what you can put on them. Here are a couple of examples we’ve seen:
Made from Recycled Material, with a big recycling triangle printed on it. Assumptions would be that you can recycle it. No, it’s “made from” recycled paper and LDPE, resulting in it not being recyclable.
Remember to Recycle printed on the side. On the base of the cup “Recycle plastic lid, put in General Waste”. How many of you have looked at the bottom of your coffee cup???
Recyclable & Compostable…well which is it? Turned out it was compostable but how likely is it that these cups ended up in paper recycling?
I’m Plastic Free, Recycle Me. Nice little rhyme but again PLA lined and so shouldn’t go into paper recycling, instead the compostable bin (if there is one, otherwise hello landfill).
Solutions
As individuals we just need to be aware of this confusion and make the correct choices. If you have a compostable cup then don’t put it in the paper recycling. If there isn’t a compostable bin, then ask the question why? Why provide compostable cups with no compostable solution?
Then you can always take your own, although I was shocked to find a large coffee brand using a paper cup to make the coffee to then pour it into my reusable cup. When I asked why, it was to make sure the quantity was correct because my cup wasn’t bought from their chain…the paper cup was then put in the general waste.
As for corporations, we have an example of where we assisted them in the handling of their disposable cups.
A client of ours provides tasting sessions for new consumer products. For safety reasons these need to be disposable. As part of a genuine effort to be more sustainable they changed their plastic cups to paper ones. After a few months of managing their recycling we questioned their paper cup because there was no indication on the cup as to what the lining was made of.
Their procurement team was not aware of the different types of paper cups available and so we performed lab tests to discover that it was LDPE lined and so not recyclable or compostable. Based on this information we were then able to provide alternatives that were more sustainable and better suited to their zero waste to landfill efforts.
Recent developments in a new material, Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), could be a solution due to it properly biodegrading at normal temperatures. A plastic bottle is expected to Biodegrade in 1.5-3 years and so the thin film in paper cups would be considerably less than that.
Conclusion
Ultimately it seems, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. At the moment there is no perfect solution for paper cups (even if you try to avoid them like mentioned earlier), it’s down to understanding the differences between all the different types and what to do with each one. Mainly though, at no point should any paper cups go in the paper recycling because there are no 100% paper cups, no one wants hot coffee spilling on you from a soggy cup.
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