Graduate Project – Biodegradable coffee cups

In general, it is an independent design project for my university degree. It is mainly focusing on the environmental issue of disposable waste pollution and urge people to use sustainable and biodegradable disposable materials. This project is going to ask the cafes and canteens at school campus to replace their takeaway coffee cups and containers into biodegradable coffee cups and containers. I am going to provide an amount of branded and designed biodegradable cups and containers for the cafes every day, and this action will last for a week as a trial test. There should be an information poster or banner stand behind the counter that tell the details of this campaign. Therefore, I would sincerely like to ask all of you to donate your money in order to let me collect enough money on the production of my branded cups and products for my project.

Further background information of this project:

The issue of saving our environment has been raised up in the recent years.

In the UK, there are nearly more than half of the citizen buys takeaway coffee or tea every day. It seems an enjoyable lifestyle, however, it is affecting our environment due to a large amount of non-recyclable coffee cups was wasted. According to the information that reported by The Guardian (2016), there are nearly more than 8 millions and 3 billion of disposable coffee cups were handed out by different cafes. But, unfortunately, less than ¼ is being recycled. Moreover, people may think they are buying the “recyclable” cups that they find the Mobius loop, the little triangular arrows of the recyclable logo on those cups. In fact, it is not a governmentally approved logo that any company can put this logo on their product, and it is not that environmental-friendly which is still harmful to our earth.

At first, they are still filling up the landfills after the process of recycling. On the other hand, those recyclable cups and takeaway containers are not easy to break them down into recyclable materials. Action for Community & Environment (ACE), a progressive environmental charity, claims that the disposable cups are difficult to sort with the recycling process. It is because there is a thin plastic liner that sticks on the paper cup, and it makes the recycling process more complicated and they are not always filtered correctly when mixed recycling is sorted. Therefore, although people put the cups into the correct recycling bin, those cups still end up in a landfill; it is still not good for our environment.

Alternatively, using biodegradable materials for producing the disposable cups and takeaway containers is the better and more efficient way to tackle the problem of pollution. Biodegradable material means to be those materials that can be consumed by microorganisms, and the specific demand of that object can be broke down under composting condition. They are commonly capable of decomposing back into natural or organic elements, for examples, oxygen. Thus, this project wants to let more people aware the problem of using recyclable materials and even some of the chained coffee shops join the recycle scheme that collecting back customers’ coffee cups for recycling, it is not the best way to address the problem.