Brisbane roasts single-use coffee cups

Brisbane City Council (BCC) is far and away the country’s largest local government, with a population of 1.25 million and an annual budget that reaches over $1 billion. Waste challenges are on a similar scale, with a 2017 waste characterisation survey revealing that about 156 million single-use coffee cups are thrown away each year. In response, the Reusable Cup Initiative has steadily been grinding that number down while raising awareness and changing attitudes.

Brisbane’s Waste Minimisation team (a division of the Waste and Resources Recovery branch) conceived the Reusable Cup Initiative in 2017, targeting regular customers of selected cafés. 
 
Working in partnership with these cafés, the campaign aimed to enable staff to confidently discuss the benefits of reusable cups with regular customers who were high consumers of takeaway hot drinks.
 
Three rounds of the campaign have been rolled out to-date, each fully subscribed with 100 partner cafés. Each café received 20 reusable coffee cups with BCC branding, and in turn passed them on to regular customers. Each customer who received a cup was also given a loyalty card, earning a stamp each time they re-used their cup and a free drink for the tenth stamp.
 
Each round diverts as many as 20,000 single-use cups from landfill in the two weeks following rollout, or 520,000 cups per year. But the reach of the campaign goes far beyond its initial impacts. 
 
Café partners are encouraged to become advocates of reusable cups through personal engagement with council project officers; signage and branding is provided, and messaging is extended through advertising and engagement on radio, outdoor media, social media, and other press.
 
The campaign has earned considerable media attention, attracted praise from participants and partners, and seen Brisbane recognised as the national leader in reusable cups by the ABC. 
 
In 2019, evaluation surveys demonstrated that 76% of those who had been exposed to the campaign had taken action to reduce single-use coffee cups going to landfill. Among other impacts, the initiative is successfully converting difficult-to-reach demographics: half of those exposed to the campaign had not previously understood the scale of the issue beforehand.