Legacy of the disposable cup

Abstract

Single-Use Plastics It is estimated that, as a global population, we use between 250 billion and 300 billion disposable cups annually. These cups are mostly composed of virgin tree cellulose coated with plastic and are almost never recycled. Foteinis conducted a life-cycle analysis of disposable cup use, focusing on the United Kingdom, and found that their annual carbon footprint was equivalent to that produced by the manufacture of ∼11,500 midsized cars or that of 1.5 million European residents. Improved recycling could reduce these impacts by up to 40%, and reusable cups would reduce the carbon footprint threefold. Disposable cups represent only a tiny bit of our daily resource use, so these results emphasize just how large an impact our day-to-day activities have on the planet. They also show how much improvement we have the potential to make with small, seemingly inconsequential choices. J. Clean. Prod. 255 , 120294 (2020).