Ecosurety funded Refill Return Cup Scheme launches in Bristol

Ecosurety's Exploration Fund initiative, Bristol Refill Return Cup Scheme, has launched today, on World Refill Day.

The scheme, run by environmental group City to Sea, aims to reduce the amount of single-use cups entering Bristol’s waste stream by offering consumers the option to ‘borrow’ a reusable takeaway cup that can be picked up and dropped off at participating coffee shops across the whole city.

Preventing single-use waste

Currently, more than 2.5 billion takeaway coffee cups are used and thrown away each year in the UK. That’s an astonishing 10,000 every two minutes. It’s estimated that if the Bristol Refill Return Cup was used by just one in ten residents just once a week, then 46,000 single-use cups would be saved across the city every week – that’s a massive 2.5 million single-use coffee cups a year.

City to Sea’s Head of Development, Jane Martin commented, “We can’t keep going as we are with park bins overflowing and our Harbourside littered with floating single-use coffee cups. We need to do things differently. And after years of research we are really delighted to be launching our Refill Return Cup that completely eliminates the need to carry a reusable cup with you. Instead, you can pick one of our reusable cups up anywhere in the city and then drop it off at any participating coffee shop. These will all be mapped on the award-winning Refill app.”