Pret has rolled out its coffee cup recycling scheme to over 350 UK outlets, following successful pilots in London, Leeds and Glasgow.
Almost 90% of Pret shops nationwide now have a recycling point on the shop floor, with customers able to leave any paper coffee cup – not only a Pret cup – for Team Members to recycle.
The recycling points are mostly available on shop floors, rather than behind the counter, making them more visible to customers and passers-by.
Working with leading waste management companies, Pret’s scheme helps to ensure that coffee cups can be easily collected, processed, and recycled. The materials will then be used to create high quality stationery and packaging products.
Director of Strategy & Sustainability, Laura Gutowski, commented, “Doing our bit for the planet is enormously important to us at Pret. We are absolutely committed to improving recycling rates of our coffee cups and we want it to be as easy as possible for customers – and those passing our shops – to get involved.
“That’s why we have put our recycling points on the shop floor, rather than hidden away behind the counter, and why we’ll happily accept any high street coffee cups, not just those from Pret.”
This initiative forms part of Pret’s wider efforts to encourage and incentivise environmental action in-shop. In January 2018, Pret doubled its discount for customers who bring in their own reusable cup to 50p, and since then, usage has increased almost 20-fold.
Over 150,000 drinks are now served in reusable cups every week, with Pret customers saving over 6 million paper cups since January 2018.
In addition to its own scheme, Pret is a part of the Valpak scheme, a nationwide cup recycling scheme that funds the collection of paper coffee cups for recycling.
Contributors to the scheme pay a supplement for every tonne of cups collected, making it more commercially and financially attractive for waste collectors to put in place the infrastructure and processes to collect, sort and transport coffee cups to recycling facilities.