In the UK we use 7 million disposable coffee cups every day – that’s 2.5 billion every year, with only 1% recycled. And around 100+ million plastic cups are used every year at UK festivals and live events, and most of these are incinerated or sent to landfill.

Sheffield hosts hundreds of events each year, with most outdoor events using single-use disposable cups. This is not, and cannot be, the future.

So are reusables the solution?

Yes. For every 1 million reusable event cups in regular use, 1000 tonnes of C02e emissions and 300 tonnes waste could be avoided. Which is why Sheffield Action on Plastic owns reusable cups to hire.

But there’s a problem

At outdoors events, people move around with the cups, and there’s a high chance of cups being lost, but we need them to not be lost so that they can be returned to us and hired out for future events – a circular economy.

So what’s the best way to not lose the cups?

We advise a Deposit Return Scheme, where customers pay, for example £1, on top of their drink, which is returned to them when they drop their used cup off. But there then lies another problem…

What’s the problem?

• Customers would need to queue up at a bar to get their money back
• It would tie up staff who could be serving drinks, just to refund them
• The bar company would need to have lots of £1 coins to refund them

So what is the solution?

We recommend a cashless, hassle-free deposit return scheme where:

• The bar company / people running the bar use a scanner to scan a RFID chip on the cup at the time of purchasing a drink (like scanning out a library book). This takes a deposit from the customer’s card payment
• There are return “bins” placed around the outdoor site where customers can drop off their used cups
• After the event, staff/volunteers can scan in all of the cups using a scanning gun, which then returns the deposit back to the customer’s card they paid on

Help us to fund a hassle-free deposit return scheme

In order to run a hassle-free deposit return scheme, Sheffield Action on Plastic would need to purchase the RFID stickers to be stuck onto all our existing cups (5,000), plus a scanner and scanning gun. This puts the amount of money needed into the thousands. So we are writing to you, our supporters of taking action on plastic, to help us to fund this.

We know that bar companies and event organisers will only hire from us if there is a hassle-free deposit return scheme in place, so the sooner we have this technology, the sooner we are able to reduce single-use plastics at events in Sheffield. Please donate below. We are very grateful for any donation.