The fight against polluting coffee cups is hotting up: Costa Coffee just vowed to start a coffee cup ‘recycling revolution’, promising to recycle as many plastic cups as it produces by 2020.

Companies are beginning to wake and smell the coffee -- Pret A Manger has changed its policy to give a 50p discount if you bring your own cup, with Caffe Nero set to follow with a similar scheme. It’s all on Starbucks now: call on the coffee giant to match or better Costa Coffee’s promise of 100% recycled cups by 2020!

Starbucks: follow Costa’s lead and pledge to recycle 100% of its plastic cups!

In total, Britain discards 2.5 BILLION coffee cups every single year. Worse still, less than 1% end up getting recycled. Starbucks is one of the largest chain coffee shops in the UK, so its contributions to this waste are huge.

Huge to the tune of 4 billion cups each year -- that’s 8000 plastic lined cups every minute. Ten years ago, Starbucks promised the world a recyclable cup by 2015 -- but that deadline passed without any progress. Last month, following a petition from over 1 million people Starbucks finally committed serious money to the project with a “three-year ambition” and a $10m investment.

But it can do better. The UN has already declared plastic waste a ‘planetary crisis’. So we need to see action ensuring ever more single use coffee cups stop ending up in landfill. Starting now.

Costa has committed to financially incentivising waste collectors to take cups to the right plants. This is a clear step in the right direction from the UK’s biggest coffee firm -- now it’s up to competitors like Starbucks to rise to this challenge.

Tell Starbucks to follow Costa’s lead and pledge to recycle 100% of plastic cups by 2020 - or sooner!

SumOfUs members like you are stepping up our efforts to tackle plastic waste. Recently we called for a ‘Latte Levy’, charging customers a little extra if they don’t bring a reusable cup, like the 5p plastic bag scheme. And over 400,000 of SumOfUs members like you have also joined our fight to take on McDonald’s, whose plastic straws are clogging up our oceans and killing marine life. Right now, we’re fighting on several fronts -- and we’re winning. 

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