Hugh's War On Waste was filmed for the BBC, with an episode revealing the recycling of paper coffee cups. According to the programme, around seven million paper coffee cups are thrown away in the UK every day - that's 2.5 billion a year - and 100,000 trees need to be felled. Many well-known coffee shop chains label their heat-insulating jackets "100% recycled" but only the paper can actually be recycled -- and only 1% of their cups are recycled.
To be waterproof, manufacturer of coffee paper cups will paint the inner layer of polyethylene. Only two recycling fields in the UK can separate plastic film from paper cups, and ordinary recycling fields do not have such technologies. In addition to the food and beverage residue often contained in the cups, the recycling plant will be sent directly to the incinerator, and cannot enter the recycling system of the treatment plant.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 1.07 billion paper cups are discarded in Taiwan each year, with less than 10% recycled.
Only 10% of Taiwan's recycling sites are run by the public sector; the other 90% are private. The recycling mechanism of public agencies has a notice to set up a category of "paper containers", where the recycled paper containers (coffee cups, bento) are more likely to be sent to the only professional paper container processor in the whole Taiwan.
As there are few independent types of paper containers in the private sector, the paper containers are handed over to general waste paper processors, just as in the U.K. The energy consumed in the process of treatment and the pollution produced is also a second degree of harm to the environment.
