• Where china is used, either with the issue of cups for personal use, or a supply of crockery, cups will require washing.
• Cups may not be washed at all between drinks, or at best given a quick rinse under the tap. Not surprisingly ‘tummy bugs' are frequent reasons for staff absence.
• Whichever washing method is used, each has a time implication, and time in the work place is money. Just twenty people having three drinks a day and taking five minutes to wash their cup before each drink amounts to a loss of twenty five hours each week. Annually, this reaches a massive one hundred and fifty days lost production from the workforce! With an average wage of only £40.00 per day, the cost to the company would total £6,000! A staff of one hundred will lose their company £30,000, each year, just washing cups.
• Plastics are produced using by-products of oil used in other applications, and even then, only a very small percentage is used for the production of all plastic packaging, including cups.
• The impact on the environment of the distribution process of cups from manufacturer to final destination is much greater in the case of china cups due to their weight and size, when compared with plastic cups, which are both lighter and stacked during transportation
• The environmental impact of plastic and china cups, throughout their complete life cycle has been compared. The Tauw report** found that a china cup would need to be used a minimum of 3,000 times before disposal, to equal the impact of a plastic cup used once and thrown away.
• When disposed of in landfill sites, neither china nor plastic degrade, a process, which even for organic waste, relies on optimum conditions including moisture and /or light.
• Plastics, in particular plastic cups can, and are, being recycled. The finite resource need not be wasted but can be reclaimed and used again to manufacture products, which do not require the use of virgin material. All food contact products are made from virgin polymer. Save a Cup collects and reprocesses the cups, the material is then used to manufacture useful second-generation products. Studies have also shown that it requires less energy to manufacture an item from recycled material than from virgin material. Many of the products produced from the cups, are then sold back into the offices and factories from where the cups were collected, reinforcing the recycling message.
• The support of the vending industry has enabled Save a Cup to offer a collection for recycling service for used vending cups nationally.
• The concept of cup recycling can be demonstrated by one product in particular. At the office buy one vended cup of coffee today, drink the coffee, place the plastic cup in the recycling bin, and write with a pencil made from a plastic cup next week. The recycling loop has been closed!

For further information please visit: http://www.save-a-cup.co.uk/ 

**Further information on the environmental impact of plastic, paper and china cups may be found in a report entitled Re-usable versus Disposable, commissioned by the Ministry of Housing, Physical Planning and Environment (VROM), Materials and Risk Management in May 1992, and produced by: TAUW Infra Consult bv, Postbus 479, 7400. AL Deventer, The Netherlands.