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There was a motion a few months back (maybe last year actually), to put a charge on takeaway cups, as with plastic bags, but it was dismissed as Starbucks and Costa were seen to be "doing enough" with their discounts for bringing your own cup.
It's quite a big initial outlay for indy coffee shops to buy the stock of reusable cups and then the pressure of having to shift them too, when you're already working with a low margins. At the cafe I used to work in, I would incentivise purchasing a keep cup by giving people a free coffee when you purchased one, and then calculating the time before it paid for itself if you got 20p off per coffee, worked pretty well.
Takeaway cups are generally still considered such standard practice that many coffee shops don't even consider them as a cost to the business, because of the perceived loss of custom without them.
My 2 pence :)
edit you're not wrong. Most are un-recyclable, and the ones that are compostable currently need to be disposed of in separate waste to go to a commercial composting facility (this rarely happens), although this is changing and you may soon be able to put them in the garden/food waste bins.
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I know in Dublin pretty much all coffee shops offer a discount if you bring in your own cup. A lot are using Vegware takeaway cups and lids now too which are fully compostable. My local coffee shops bean bags are nearly completely compostable too (they're still trying to source compostable ink for the labels)
The only negative I have heard is people bringing in dirty cups which could potentially contaminate the coffee station.
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Discounts for reusable cups, selling them etc.
We offer 20p discount if you bring a cup because that’s about what our printed cups used to cost. The unit price is down now, but we can’t really reduce the discount.
Why don’t we sell reusable cups on the counter? Firstly because it’s a big capital investment for something which might take ages to shift - cash flow is a twat. Secondly because fuck takeaway cups and fuck reusables too. If you care, change your routine and drink your coffee on the premises on a ceramic cup. Replacing one environmentally disastrous cup with an environmentally disastrous cup you use 20 times before the novelty wears off and you lose it is horseshit.
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Double_J
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@cornelius_blackfoot
So was thinking about this as I sipped on a takeaway coffee, from my uppercup. With the growing awareness of the need to recycle and reduce plastic waste and to be more eco friendly, was wondering why more coffee shops aren’t offering discounts/incentives to coffee drinkers to use reusable cups.
I know a couple that give you 20p off when you use one, but was wondering why that wasn’t standard practice, and why more don’t offer reusable cups for sale at the counter?
@StevePeel @Matisse do you guys know why this is the case, what’s the financial case for not doing it/doing it would be?
Is this something that the independent coffee shops start and then the larger chains take on, or vice versa?
And what’s an acceptable % of reusable cup to takeaway cup usage which actually helps the environment.
This is all based on the premise that takeaway cups and lids for them in most coffee shops aren’t recycled, I may be wrong in that assumption.