We often ask ourselves whether it is sufficient to be self-critical when it comes to following stringent standards of environmentally clean, sustainable sources of raw materials. We do follow standards to the point that many would fail, but still it often becomes important to be a little more than just being self-critical, we need to remind you too, of the importance of choosing a environment conscious supplier for your paper cups.
To make our stand clear, here are a few of the important sustainability factors we carefully make sure we do not fail to follow.
- We follow the UK Farming and Food Industry Standard Guidelines as elaborated here and here in the UK Food Industry Sustainability Strategy 2006 here.
- We use 100% pristine white food grade paper resourced from manufacturers who in turn are certified to be supplied by PEFC/SFC Certified Sustainable Forests only.
- We follow international guidelines in limiting use of Recycled Paper in manufacturing paper cups. Using of Recycled Paper is not encouraged in manufacturing food grade paper, due to their chances of being contaminated with previous usage chemicals and concentration of harmful chemicals. Moreover, Recycled Paper is generally light and porous and doesn’t hold well when holding liquids, especially hot liquids like coffee.
- During the manufacturing of a paper cup, the cup is laminated with a plastic resin called polyethylene. This PE coating prevents seeping of liquid and absorption by the paper and also prevents any possible micro contamination from the paper, although the virgin white pure papers are treated to be 100% microbe or contaminant free, the PE coating adds more safety to that.
- This PE Coating, while making your drink safer, your experience better, is 100% food safe but has the problem of rendering the paper cups non-recyclable conventionally, these cups are 90% bio-degradable but not 100% recyclable, and many communities do not accept paper cups for recycling, but there are many more who do, and there are companies like Simply Cups in UK that are doing the job of collecting and recycling paper cups. So if you are consumer, and a conscious one, or you are the vendor who uses these cups for delivering your products, you should start thinking about getting in touch with some company like Simply Cups as soon as you can.
- As a manufacturer of paper cups from step one of its manufacturing from pristine virgin paper at our Northampton Factory, we take care of our end of the Recycling very well and have been recycling our paper wastes, over runs and quality check failed stock through Viridor UK.
- There is a new wave of reusing mugs to reduce the landfill methane emission by reducing the use of paper cups, which we admit is not a bad idea, but the problem, lies in the point that for multiple uses throughout the day cleaning becomes a problem. We promote proper recycling of paper cups to reduce the per year landfill due to paper cups.
- Another problem with a reusable mug is that although the carbon footprint of a reusable mug is much larger than that of a paper cup, and although the reusable cup reaches the break-even soon after a few repeated usages, it remains to be an idea that might not find much encouragement in the end, and more over, consumers should not be forced to share the responsibility due to the vendor, and vendors should be more careful about the recycling aspects of paper cups, and Simply Cups above is a nice option in our opinion.
- We use food safe inks for all our cups and our cups are safe.
- James Cropper PLC has developed a technology to recycle disposable paper cups too, so there are options and ways better than carrying around steel cups and still be earth friendly.
Environment and sustainability is not a responsibility to pass on to the one before you in the chain, we can all be part of it and still enjoy our coffee without having to worry, let us join hands in recycling paper cups and making our beloved paper cups more environment friendly.