Danish City Paid Residents To Return Coffee Reusable Cups. Could This Model Spread To Other Cities? – CoffeeTalk

In January 2024, the Danish city of Aarhus launched a three-year trial project to curb the number of disposable coffee cups. The initiative was designed by Norwegian waste management company TOMRA and aimed to recycle popular products such as cold or hot beverage cups that are used for an average of just 15 minutes before going to waste. Only less than 2% of single-use plastic coffee cups are recycled worldwide.

The pilot program required not only building machines, deciding where to place them, and creating the recyclable cups but also changing consumer behaviours. Plastic convenience has been optimized for decades, and if consumers had a choice between single-use plastics and reusable ones, the adoption rate would be low.

To convince citizens, the initiative was initially supported by 45 cafes which agreed to offer takeaway drinks in reusable cups as an alternative option to single-use cups. In the first weeks, the return rate was only around 25%, making Rossau doubt the system would pick up. For reusable cups to be a better alternative to their single-use counterparts they need to be recycled at least six times, reaching a return rate of 82%.

A turning point came during the city’s week-long festival Aarhus Uke in September, where retailers in the event exclusively offered the reuse cups. Many more citizens were exposed to them and around 100,000 cups were returned, an amount which would have filled 1,200 trash bins.

The pilot programme set out to collect 500,000 cups in its first year, a target that was far exceeded as cups were returned 735,000 times, saving 14 tonnes of plastic from incineration and CO2 emissions. For 2025, the goal is to collect 1.5 million cups, with an additional 1.5 million planned for the third year. In the pipeline, Aarhus Municipality is looking to expand to a few other nearby small cities, as well as to other forms of food packaging.

If extended nationwide, the project could significantly reduce the use of single-use takeaway packaging, which currently accounts for 500 million disposable items annually in Denmark. Aarhus is a mid-sized town, and scaling the model to larger cities presents different challenges and opportunities.

Europe is cracking down on plastic waste by strengthening their reuse systems, with cities like Barcelona, Berlin, Leuven, Ghent, Rotterdam, and Paris battling against the packaging waste crisis by strengthening their reuse systems. These actions support the EU’s broader waste reduction goals, within the recently approved Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR).