Why eco cups are rubbish
Patients and hospital staff in Canterbury use nearly 2 million foam cups a year – enough for every person in the region to have three apiece.
The Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB) says it wants to go ‘‘biodegradable’’, but the lack of a commercial composting facility in the region means it sends 1.75 million polystyrene cups to landfill every year.
A social enterprise founder says he knows more Christchurch businesses would make the shift to compostable coffee cups and food packaging if they knew the products were living up to their name. But that largely isn’t happening.
The vast majority of compostable cups – 100 per cent plant-based products made from a paper outside and lined with the bioplastic polyactic acid – end up going to landfill.
There are no commercial composting facilities in the city with resource consent to accept and process compostable takeaway cups and lids, according to the Christchurch City Council.
‘‘All coffee cups that are put in the green organics kerbside collection wheelie bins are screened out and diverted to landfill,’’ council solid waste manager Ross Trotter said.
Research from The Packaging Forum – which estimates New Zealanders use 295 million disposable cups a year – found only 11 facilities existed nationwide to process compostable cups at scale.
‘‘Something needs to change. There needs to be new systems and infrastructure built, otherwise we just keep on polluting – and that’s just not good enough,’’ Cultivate Christchurch co-founder Bailey Perryman said.
The social enterprise collected a small amount of compostable packaging from restaurants and cafes in the inner city signed up to its organic waste collection service.
‘‘But if they’re not coming to us, they’re going to landfill.’’
Perryman said even going to landfill, the compostable cups were preferable to using plastic-based products. Many hospitality businesses in the city already used them, but he thought some were holding back.
‘‘Cultivate is aware of other hospitality outlets that would make the change if there was some certainty that the product is being composted.’’
Reusable or ‘‘keep cups’’ were better still, he said.
A supplier of commercially compostable packaging argued that by providing the product, companies would be incentivised to set up composting facilities, something Perryman thought was only a matter of time in Christchurch.
CDHB support service manager Rachel Cadle said the DHB reintroduced glass cups about eight years ago, but disposable cups had been retained in areas without washing areas.
The DHB would prefer to use biodegradable cups, but there was no local facility capable of taking the commercial quantities of compostable or biodegradable cups that would be produced, she said.
The 1.75 million polystyrene cups used each year cost the Canterbury DHB $52,500, at a rate of 0.03c per cup. Other DHBs around the country are starting to phase them out, including the Waitemata¯ DHB, which has committed to moving to a biodegradable paper option.