How to deal with your paper coffee cups

Coffee consumption is quite different among different countries. For example, American or Japanese can consume about 400 cups of coffee in average each year. But it is only 5 cups for Chinese. Of course, we can see it is growing at a rate of about 20 percent annually in China. Coffee as a world popular drink, you can imagine how many billion disposable coffee cups consumed. Also most of coffee cups are made out of virgin materials instead of recycled paper. How to deal with your paper coffee cups properly? This is question we need to think about and it is important to improve the recycling level as much as we can.

Are paper coffee cups recyclable?

Most people will think paper coffee cups recycling is similar as milk cartons recycling. Actually they have quite different ending. Because most coffee cups go to landfill finally due to the thin plastic coating. Milk cartons have high quality fibers which can make new paper and building materials. But for paper coffee cups, the ink on the outside of cup like company logo and contact information will soak into fibers. This creates more recycling processes including sorting and removing ink from fibers. Since these additional process needs more energy and expense, it loses economic benefits and there is not much of the market. But we still encourage more innovations and development on paper coffee cups recycling. Because this is the world topic and world environment problem.

How to deal with your paper coffee cups properly?

Although most paper coffee cups are not recyclable in real world due to some limitations from process and recycling expense, we still need to do something on improving this issue. Yes, some people and communities are doing now.

1. A few municipalities are collecting clean cups and try to process them in efficient and cost effective way. If they are successful, that will be good news for the world to follow.

2. For most individuals, if you can bring your own cups, it provides the biggest environment benefit. For example, if coffee shop can encourage and offer a discount for bringing your own mug, it is a small change but big impact for this world.

3. If above efforts are not available, we go back to final solution which is to reduce the size of landfill. Baling the scrap paper coffee cups into much denser bales for easy transportation and space saving really makes great sense. Or you can crush the coffee cups into much smaller pieces by a crusher and then make dense bales. Anyhow SINOBALER can be your good help if you have any size reduction requirement for waste.