25 signatures reached
To: Theresa Villiers - Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Ditch the Disposable
Introduce a bill to ban disposable takeaway cups.
Why is this important?
500,000 Disposable cups are dropped on the floor daily, littering our countryside and our streets. Many find their way into the oceans adding to the plastic islands with the biggest of these islands now 7 times the size of Great Britain!
When run or cycle I am constantly stopping to pick up these cups dropped all over the countryside.
Every minute in the UK 2 trees are chopped down to feed our takeaway coffee habit - that is around 2,800 trees per day! Go outside and stand looking at the trees and then imagine you come back tomorrow and every tree you can see gone for 50-100 metres in all directions ... just to get a coffee on the go!
We use more than 7 million disposable cups each day in UK and recycle less than 4%. The pile of cups going to landfill each year is bigger than the Albert Hall!
Mainly the cups are combined paper and plastic with the plastic taking 40-400 years to degrade in micro plastics. These then enter our environment and our bodies - already shown to be reaching the brains of fish and causing them to be disorientated.
Many of the so called compostable cups are not much better as they need to be industrially composted which means they are not even collected in big numbers. As virgin paper needs to be used for these cups the trees still get cut down.
There are easy alternatives to assuage our coffee habit - use a reusable takeaway cup, sit in an enjoy your cuppa in a porcelain mug or grab an espresso caffeine hit in Italian style.
Baristas in all the major coffee chains hate this part of their job. They do not like giving our these highly destructive cups.
In order to get change we need a blanket ban on all these cups which will mean alternatives quickly takeover - we will all still find a way to get our coffee ... simply in a more sustainable way which is nicer to our planet and climate.
