Each year, about 250 billion to-go cups that serve coffee and tea from places like Starbucks and McDonald's are produced to satisfy the world's love for hot drinks on the run. These paper-based cups have the inside surface covered with plastic to prevent water from escaping, and keep water from being absorbed into the material, but that also removes any opportunity for the cups to be biodegradable (可生物降解的).
The materials that created these cups of goodness and convenience are recyclable, but only if separated. In addition, the demand for such resources is low, so they are worth next to nothing.
In response to this great challenge, NextGen Consortium, a multi-year partnership led by Starbucks and McDonald's launched their first big initiative (倡议)—NextGen Cup. The first step in NextGen Cup was an open competition where participants presented ideas for sleeves, cups, lids and other parts of the hot-cold paper-based takeaway coffee cup that would make it reusable, recyclable, or biodegradable, to finally be widely used. 12 winners, announced in 2019, shared a prize of $ 1 million, as well as personalized growth, and support from members of NextGen Consortium.
Later, they launched two pilot programs at independent coffee shops in California. In one case, customers were given "smart" reusable cups made mostly from recyclable plastic. They then could drop their empties into collection containers at key locations, for washing and reuse. These cups were printed with RFID chips or QR codes, through which coffee shops can know where there is the greatest need for collection containers and how many are not using them.
To reduce coffee cup waste, Cup Club is already replacing millions of takeaway cups in the UK, while Recup in Germany, has performed a deposit system (押金系统) that simply adds a small extra fee to any coffee cup which is returned to the buyer after the cup is deposited in any registered collection point.
