UK chain Costa pledges new recycling targets for coffee cups

LONDON – A U.K. coffee house chain has pledged to recycle as many disposable cups as it sells by 2020, trying to appease public anxiety over the increasing levels of waste in the world’s oceans.

Costa Coffee says it will recycle up to 500 million disposable cups a year amid growing pressure to do more to alleviate the trash from the estimated 2.5 billion disposable cups used annually in Britain. Costa says it will pay waste collectors a supplement for the cups, making it more commercially attractive to collect, sort and transport them to specialist facilities for recycling.

Costa managing director Dominic Paul says by creating a market for coffee cups as a valuable recyclable material, more of them will get recycled.

The chain has 2,380 shops in the UK.