The Square Mile Challenge launched in April 2017. At the time, the plan was to collect and recycle half a million coffee cups within the centre of London in just one month. They did it, in fact, they prevented a whopping 509,091 coffee cups from going straight to landfill in April 2017 alone. They didn’t stop there though. The challenge is still ongoing and to date, they have collected almost 4 million coffee cups. When it comes to rubbish removal in London, they are true heroes. Just like us, here at Clearabee, they are preventing rubbish that won’t biodegrade from going to landfill and they are making sure that it is put to good use elsewhere.

Collecting Cups

The initiative is led by an organisation called Hubbub, a charity that seeks to have an environmental impact by creating campaigns that offer something unique. They endeavour to find quirky ways to get their point across in the hopes that the message will really resonate with the public. Their original campaign saw a number of huge yellow coffee cup shaped bins in the centre of London so that people could throw their cups straight in. When it came to rubbish removal in London, the city could not host these bins indefinitely so Hubub is now working with a number of partner organisations. If an organisation is involved they will have a yellow sticker in the window. This sticker means that you can take your used coffee cup, from any coffee shop to them and that they will send it to be recycled rather than let it be sent straight to landfill.

The Partners

There are 117 locations around the square mile in London where you can recycle your coffee cups. The partners involved in the initiative include; Costa, Marks & Spencer, Pret a Manger, Nespresso, McDonalds and Starbucks. The City of London and Network Rail at Liverpool Street Station are also very much involved in the programme, encouraging the public to recycle the cups as much as they can. When it comes to boosting rubbish removal in London that doesn’t involve a landfill, it seems that there is plenty of support for a solution.

The Recycling

With only 1% of the 2.5 billion coffee cups that are used in the UK every year being recycled, initiatives such as these are essential. Even putting the cups into recycling bins at home doesn’t guarantee the cups won’t just end up at landfill because they are notoriously difficult to recycle due to the plastic lining. By giving your cups to one of the partners involved in this initiative you can be sure that your cups will actually make it to a recycling plant dedicated to dealing with the complexity of reusing the cups. They can remove the plastic and recover fibres to make products such as cardboard containers. Sometimes, they shred the whole coffee cup and mix it with plastic resin to create new plastic.

Clearabee

Here at Clearabee, we love to hear a good news story about rubbish removal in London. We hate to send products to landfill too and that is why, when you hire us to handle your rubbish removal needs we will ensure that at least 90% of what we collect from you will go to be recycled. We sort through your rubbish as we collect it, the first thing we do is designate some items to go straight to a charity or second-hand shop where they can be useful to others in their current condition. Next, we would separate rubbish into different types and will send them to specialist recycling centres where they can be made into totally new products. We only ever send something to landfill as a last resort.