How to approach messaging

• Visualise the issue and offer local statistics. This helps to engage people on recycling and change behaviour. This can easily be done by dividing the annual or daily national cup statistics by the local population or footfall of your site or high street. Showing what recycling coffee cups can be turned into helps convey a message of the value of ‘waste’ and the circular economy. But the message needs to be simple and tangible. Consider working with local artists/setbuilders to create a public installation showing the scale of the issue.

• Use striking cup stats such as:

• We use almost 3 billion cups per year in the UK, enough to stretch around the world 5.5 times

• Every day, we bin 8 million coffee cups in the UK, that’s more than 5,500 per minute

• Less than 4% of coffee cups in the UK are currently recycled – be part of the solution!

• Nudge messaging at the point of disposal – for example arrows on general waste bins pointing towards the cup bin, to encourage people to use the cup recycling bins for their cup bins.

• Learn and refine. Don’t expect to get everything right straightaway! Try, learn, then refine.

Raise awareness

Clear communications and an awareness-raising campaign are required alongside the introduction of new cup recycling infrastructure. Make some noise to raise awareness when you introduce cup recycling. This allows you to ‘warm up’ the public to the idea of recycling coffee cups in an engaging way.

In the Leeds by Example trial, recycling awareness and behaviour increased after the communications launch, suggesting a clear correlation between the communications activities and use of the new recycling bins.