Will a charge on cups work as well as the 5p bag initiative? (Picture: Getty)

Recycling is a hot topic at the moment.

Iceland announced it will be the first supermarket to go plastic free, McDonald’s is aiming to have 100% recyclable packaging by 2025, and the government has proposed a coffee cup tax dubbed the ‘latte levy’.

We throw away 2.5 billion coffee cups every year.

A lot of these cups are made from paper on the outside, but have plastic on the inside to make them waterproof.

This means they are difficult to recycle and most end up in landfills.

To solve this, the government is thinking about putting a 25p levy on the cups, with the intention of encouraging people to bring their own re-usable cups.

Some retailers do use compostable cups, but it’s difficult to tell the difference between the types of cups and which bin to put them in.


There are now prototypes of smart bins that can scan your empty coffee cup, and use a combination of image recognition and machine learning to detect and learn whether it’s plastic, paper, compostable or recyclable, and tell you which section of the bin to throw it away into.

The smart bin can be connected to an app to track your recycling habits and allow retailers to reward you for doing it right.

On the grand scheme of the things, reducing the number of coffee cups we throw away is not going to fix all of our waste and recycling issues.

It will, however, do something very important; and that’s drive behaviour change.

This is similar to how the 5p charge on plastic bags has led to an almost 90% reduction of their use.

We are, slowly but surely, shifting towards being a more waste conscious society.

I would love to see the UK get better at reducing the amount of waste we produce, and recycling.

I think a combination of taxes, education about the topic, and use of clever technology can get us there.