Hubbub has announced the first winners of The Cup Fund, the U.K.’s largest grant fund to bolster and scale paper cup recycling.
All funded by the Starbucks 5p cup charge, twelve programmes have been selected to receive grants of between £50,000 and £100,000, to each develop long-term infrastructure.
The funding is expected to have a significant impact with cup recycling facilities to be introduced in more than 70 locations, with combined annual footfall of over 220 million. In addition, 36 organisations will work collaboratively to make the schemes a success
Furthermore 35 million cups are estimated to be recycled over the course of a year, including over 4 million in London alone.
The ability to recycle paper cups has increased over the last two years and there is now enough capacity in the U.K. to recycle all paper cups used. However, because cups have a plastic lining that stops hot drinks from leaking, they need to be collected separately from other paper goods.
As a result, specific cup recycling points are needed as well as clear communication to help the public recycle easily.
All cups collected by the funded projects will be recycled within the U.K. into new products including paper bags and greetings cards.
The winning projects include five programmes across London to boost cup recycling in Brixton, Camden and on the Southbank, offices and public spaces across the Grosvenor estate and three London universities.
City-wide recycling schemes in Bristol, York, Oxford and Northampton and pioneering projects to trial new approaches to cup recycling in a retail park in Nottinghamshire and service stations in Gloucestershire and Cumbria.
Gavin Ellis, Director and Co-Founder of Hubbub, said: “We have been so impressed with the scale of the winning projects’ ambitions and we are looking forward to supporting them over the coming year.”
Shirley Rodrigues, Deputy Mayor of London for Environment and Energy, added: “I’m pleased to see five London-based projects are being awarded the Cup Fund. It’s great to see projects which prevent single-use cups ending up in landfill or being incinerated, but our ultimate goal must be to reduce the amount we use in the first place. We already know that there is a great willingness in London to ditch single-use plastic bottles and drinks containers.”
