Promoting the Use of Reusable Coffee Cups through Environmental Messaging, the Provision of Alternatives and Financial Incentives

Abstract

It is estimated that 2.5-10 bn disposable coffee cups are used every year in the U.K. Most of these cups end up in landfill or as litter, as the majority of poly-coated paper cups are not recyclable or not recycled. Here, we report on a field experiment that was conducted at twelve university and business sites to examine whether the use of reusable cups can be promoted through easily implementable measures. The study found that both environmental messaging and the provision of alternatives increased the use of reusable cups. While a charge on disposable cups increased their use as well, a discount on reusable cups did not. The effects for the individual measures were modest, but additive, meaning that the greatest behavioural change was achieved with a combination of measures. None of the measures negatively impacted the total number of hot drink sales. One university continued with the charge after the experiment had finished and distributed more reusable cups for free among their students. This boosted the use of reusable cups up to 33.7% across three cafés. This shows that a charge in combination with the provision of alternatives can increase the use of reusable cups substantially in the long term.

Choose to reuse: Predictors of using a reusable hot drink cup

“…We wanted to recruit students and staff of Australian Universities, as a University is a 'closed' system, where people spend a lot of time and may have a preference for certain locations (e.g. cafes or food trucks) (Poortinga & Whitaker, 2018).…”

How Text Mining Algorithms for Crowdsourcing Can Help Us to Identify Today's Pressing Societal Issues

“…Through collating this with the current solution space, areas in need for further focus can be identified. For example topic 30 is very prominent, but many initiatives worldwide already exist focusing on how the waste of coffee-to-go cups can be eliminated [39]. Researchers and practitioners can extrapolate that further focus on coffee-to-go cups may not be necessary, as the crowd already focuses on it.…”

Plastic habits – an overview for the collection ‘Plastics and Sustainable Earth’

“…Behavior change studies of the 1980s considered how age, gender, economic and cultural background, attitudes, and motivation were correlated with social consciousness and environmental concern, and by the 1990s there was a shift to activities such as recycling and social consciousness and environmental concern [42]. Recent investigations have looked at behavior change around individual items such as coffee cups [43], microbeads [4] and single use plastics [44] (as outlined further below in Fig. 1).…”

“…The 15 selected articles from 2019 (Table 1) cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from the way we consume coffee cups [43,51] to the Spillover Effect, where environmental awareness in one aspect of life results in better practices in other areas of life [47]. Their diversity and content suggest that the task of reducing our reliance on plastic is being considered through a variety of different lenses.…”

“…A reliance on written or pictorial information is not enough to significantly change people's behavior around disposing of takeaway containers. Messages needed to include environmental and financial incentives in addition to the provision of alternatives, such as coffee cups to change people's use of disposable cups [41,43]. While changing people's behavior is complex, there are some changes that appear to be more readily acknowledged.…”