It all starts with one cup and one choice: In Denmark’s second biggest city Aarhus you get paid when you return your coffee cup. Waste analysis shows cold or hot beverage cups are used for an average of just 15 minutes before going to waste and only less than two per cent of single use plastic coffee cups are recycled worldwide.
In January 2024, Aarhus launched a three-year reusable package project to curb the number of disposable coffee cups. The system is easy. When you buy coffee, you pay around 75 cents more for a reusable cup. Once you’ve enjoyed your drink, you can leave the cup in one of the deposit boxes, scan your card and get your money back. With a return rate of 88 per cent, the project is a success. But why?
– At some point in our lives, everyone has held a reusable coffee cup, director of Aarhus City’s circular packaging project Simon Smedegaard Rossau says. It is easy to relate to.
The right timing
The trial project is not unique at all; many cities have tried similar systems. The unique part is how well it is working. The project has seen consumers in the second-biggest Danish city return almost 900.000 cups.
– The time is right; everyone wants this; no one wants the earth to be polluted by microplastic, Simon Smedegaard Rossau says.
One of the factors behind the project is that waste analysis showed that 48 per cent of the total waste produced in Aarhus consists of drink and food packaging. In the urge to transform Aarhus into a clean city this was one of the measures. A turning point came with the Aarhus Festuge festival, a huge street festival in the city, where businesses used only reusable cups. One hundred thousand cups were recovered during the event, enough to fill 1,200 trash containers. The success of the project has got its fair share of attention.
– We did send out a press release, which many media outlets found interesting to publish. Still, the attention the project has gained came organically. I have talked to Forbes, AP and Washington Post, among others, Smedegaard Rossau comments.
Different sizes
The cups are made of reusable polypropylene (PP) and come in different sizes for soft drinks, hot and cold beverages and one transparent one for iced beverages such as iced coffee. They all have an individual code for recycling, which means they can only be returned once, which makes it impossible to cheat the system. After they are returned to the stations the cups are washed and reused.
The first cup was put in the deposit system on 17 January 2024, and the aim is to recycle even more packages in the future. To encourage participation, the city partnered with 45 local cafes that agreed to offer reusable cups alongside traditional disposable ones. At the moment, there are 22 deposit stations centrally located around the city. You can use the QR code on your cup to find the closest one.
Norwegian waste management company TOMRA designs the deposit system, and the project is a collaboration between the company and the Arhus municipality. The plan is for the system to expand to other types of packaging to facilitate the transition from single-use to reusable. There are already plans for waste such as plastic bowls and pizza boxes.
– To scale up, the hopes are high, Simon Smedegaard Rossau comments. We are waiting for legislative support for recycling systemization. If there were top-down policies, we could expand to other cities and larger environmental winnings.
On 14 December 2022, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution at its seventy-seventh session to proclaim 30 March as International Day of Zero Waste, to be observed annually.
Today, we produce about 400 million tons of plastic waste every year, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). In the early 2000s, the amount of plastic waste we generated rose more in a single decade than in the previous 40 years.
