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It's a charge. will you use a disposable coffee cup again?

Published: 2026-05-16 Author: World Gafei

Last Updated: 2026/05/16, Researchers at Cardiff University in the UK have found that charging for disposable coffee cups, like plastic shopping bags, can significantly reduce use, thereby reducing waste. According to the Daily Mail of the 30th, in the UK, Starbucks, Kashijia, McDonald's and KFC can use 2.5 billion paper cups a year to hold coffee and other drinks, all of which are equipped with a thin plastic.

Researchers at Cardiff University in the UK have found that charging for disposable coffee cups, like plastic shopping bags, can significantly reduce use, thereby reducing waste.

According to the Daily Mail on the 30th, Starbucks, Kashijia, McDonald's and KFC can use 2.5 billion paper cups for coffee and other drinks a year, and these cups are all equipped with a thin plastic cover, which is not easy to recycle.

The Cardiff University study involved 12 small cafes. The results show that charging for disposable paper cups and supplemented by paper cup garbage posters can more effectively encourage consumers to bring their own cups, and the rate can increase from 5.1% to 17.4%. This means that the annual use of disposable paper cups in the UK could be reduced by up to 300 million, the researchers said. However, the charging effect of paper cups may not be as obvious as that of plastic bags. The use of plastic bags in the UK has fallen by 70 per cent after charging, and researchers believe the drop is so big because people are easy to carry reusable alternatives, while miserable ones are not easy to carry with them.

In fact, cafes such as Starbucks and Kashijia also encourage consumers to bring their own coffee cups. Starbucks, for example, gives 25p discounts to consumers who bring their own cups, while Kashijia donates 25p to charities. However, the researchers found that these measures had no significant effect and were not as effective as the introduction of a charging mechanism.

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