When and exactly how was it that this nation of famed tea drinkers morphed into one of coffee addicts? Two recent events confirmed this impression as the new reality.
Firstly, on a train journey home, every second passenger seemed to alight with an obligatory takeaway, an array of lattes, mochas, Americanos, and cappuccinos such is now our discerning sophistication. Not a tea in sight. Even the teaspoon in the Nescafe jar seems somewhat outdated.
Equally startling was a visit to my old university, indeed visit any modern day university or college. The student bars of a bygone era appear to have given way to a plethora of coffee shops, which assume the new cool. Admittedly tea wasn’t necessarily the beverage of choice during my student days, either!
At home though, I suspect it’s different. I have a relative who refuses to drink tea in anything other than a china cup or mug, so a takeaway is never an option. I think it’s because tea is something of a traditional comfort drink, to be enjoyed at leisure. The very notion of a disposable teacup sounds ridiculous. But perhaps there’s the rub.
Reflecting the change both to our lifestyles and in coffee’s popularity, the disposable coffee cup is rapidly catching the single use plastic bottle as an environmental menace. An estimated seven million paper coffee cups are disposed of in the UK, each day. That’s disposed instead of recycled, because they are not solely paper. They contain a plastic resin, which requires separation before the paper can be recycled. Since there are only two factories in the UK with this facility, between them they can recycle barely 2% of the cups consumed. The rest go to litter and landfill.
It’s why we felt the need for some action. For well over a decade we’ve championed the cause of reusable containers. Our schoolbottle and sportsbottle brands have become synonymous with the campaign to reuse and refill, as has our work with Hydrachill Water Refill Stations. So now we’re giving coffee addicts the same chance. Take a look at http://www.reusablecups.co.uk/ and see. Relax and read about it with a nice cuppa - ideally not one you’ll not need to throw away.
