This Infographic Proves That We Have A Towering Coffee Cup Problem Coffee fuels America, but coffee cup waste is a major environmental headache. Otherwise, it says, “the government should ban them.” Jul ... the world's largest coffee chain is testing recyclable coffee cups in UK stores, the Guardian reported. Release Date: 05 August 2016 . My bus didn't represent all of them, though - 10,000 is the number of cups the UK gets through in just two minutes. Lorraine Chow. The British - like the Americans and Italians - are a nation of caffeine addicts. 4 Billion Starbucks To-Go Cups Thrown Away Each Year ... Will Recyclable Cup Reduce This Waste? If you divide that over the course of the year, that's roughly 2,700,000 paper coffee cups thrown out every day. Hundreds of thousands of coffee cups are throw into the recycling bin in the USA every day. It’s no surprise that Americans love their coffee. But the recent report on disposable coffee cups from the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (the one that proposed the 25p “latte levy” charge on takeaway drinks) says it wants to see all single-use coffee cups being recycled by 2023. 25 billion coffee cups are thrown away yearly in the USA with the majority of them not being recyclable. Starbucks has offered a discount for customers in the UK using their own mugs since it opened in 1998, and says about 1.8% of all hot drinks sold are in reusable cups. That’s a lot of cups. It’s estimated that 50 billion paper coffee cups are being thrown away in the USA every year and 2.5 billion coffee cups in the UK. In fact, 54% of Americans aged 18 and up consume coffee regularly. Up to 200 million single use coffee cups are thrown away every year in Ireland, according to a new recycling report.

However, what most people don’t recognize is that these cups are not recyclable and the USA alone throws away around 25 bn of them each year.