Designer Tackles Disposable Coffee Cup Dilemma–And Her Solution is Steaming Hot

These solidly designed hot beverage cups aren’t the disposable kind — yet you don’t have to bring them back after leaving the shop, and you won’t need to pay extra for the privilege.

As a means of preventing millions of single-use paper cups from being thrown into a landfill, architect Safia Qureshi created CupClub: a reusable takeaway coffee cup program.

While the eco-friendly concept may sound strange at first, it works sort of like a bike sharing scheme.

The cups are made of sturdy recycled polypropylene. All the consumer has to do is finish their drink, and drop it off at a designated collection area. The cups are then collected, washed, and used again for the next customer. The program is working brilliantly in offices and university campuses, where masses of people work and buy their drinks in the same area.

The cups can be used up to 132 times before they are recycled once more. Remarkably, the cups only cost about 21 cents each for the retailer, which is a fraction of what single-use cups, lids, and stirrers cost. The cups contain a chip so the container’s life-cycle can be tracked.

The designer told Dezeen: “You just drink and drop. You go to your favorite coffee shop… You order your coffee with the Cupclub product. The barista will remind you to put the cup in one of the collection points when you’re done, and that’s it. Our orders are directly with the retailer; consumers don’t pay any extra.”

“It makes you a bad designer if you make something that can’t be recycled; if you have no idea of what’s going to happen to your product after it’s been used. You’re not completing the picture or showing responsibility. Why are you doing what you’re doing?” says Qureshi.

CupClub, which was hailed for winning a portion of this year’s $2m New Plastics Economy Innovation Prize from the Ellen MacArther Foundation, has already started implementing the project in businesses and universities across London. They currently have a capacity to serve up to 6 million drinks during their first year.

“Most packaging you see isn’t really designed. It’s just there. No-one’s really thinking about end-of-life. You just don’t get very sophisticated designers looking at everyday products. There’s loads out there for designers and architects to do, instead of getting really excited about chairs. We don’t need more of those. Where is the design thought? The stuff we interact with everyday is all being done by very standard design teams. As designers we obsess over certain categories instead of looking at the whole encompassing world that has been created for us.”