One-Way Cups on the Way out
It is the European Week for Waste Reduction and together with Sodexo – the company catering Deutsche Telekom’s canteens in Germany – Deutsche Telekom is tackling one-way coffee cups! “Coffee-to-go” is yummy, handy and for many a symbol of all that is wrong with the “throw-it-away”-logic in our society.
Deutsche Telekom and Sodexo decided together to use RECUP – an established system for reusable mugs – as a sustainable alternative for German locations in the future. In Germany alone each year 2,8 billion one-way coffee-to-go cups are used and thrown away directly after use – that are mind-boggling 320.000 cups per hour! On the other hand, one RECUP-mug can replace app. 500 one-way cups and is easy to recycle at the end of its lifespan. The established deposit systems offers a smart and easy solution: you can simply take your coffee-to-go now in a sustainable mug.
Starting this week, RECUP is tested in two pilot locations: Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt and Munich-Dachauer Str. After a successful pilot, all other Telekom locations in Germany will follow successively.
The switch fits into Deutsche Telekom’s “Stop Wasting – Start Caring!” Initiative aiming at developing and promoting more sustainable and resource-efficient solutions and contribute to a more sustainable lifestyle.
Spare resources
So much resources can be saved if we opt for returnable instead of single-use cups:
- 11.000 tons CO2
- 43.000 Trees
- 40.000 tons waste
- 1,5 billion liter water
- 320 millions kWh Electricity
- 3.000 tons crude oil
That’s how it works:
- For 1 Euro deposit customers get their coffee in the reusable RECUP-mug.
- The reusable mug can be returned in every shop partnering with RECUP (see RECUP-App or www.recup.de).
- There, the desposit will be refunded, the RECUP cleaned and reused.
