91ÌÒÉ«

Following on from the pledge in our Sustainable Food and Drink policy, we conducted a trial of a returnable cup scheme at one of our highest turnover cafés - The Roastery -from January to June of this year.

We removed disposable paper cups from the café and customers could bring their own, use sit-in crockery or take a reusable cup – paying a £2 deposit that would be refunded on return of the cup within a seven-day window.

Throughout the trial, we learnt a lot about customer behaviour and sustainable practice. We were pleased to see a lot of enthusiasm for the trial from both staff and students and did receive positive feedback from many members of our community. However, we also encountered a number of operational and financial challenges that make the continuation of the scheme unviable.

Over the six months, coffee sales at The Roastery dropped by an average of 30%. Working together with the Head of the Department of Analytics, Marketing & Operations in 91ÌÒÉ« Business School, we analysed the data and concluded while there have been fluctuations in sales in other outlets, this can be reliably traced back to the introduction of the reusable cup system trial, suggesting that the system is not suitable for our café environments in its current set-up.

The use of the scheme itself presented some operational and financial setbacks, including loss in sales, additional labour cost and time. Throughout the six-month trial, we calculated a loss of up to 1,000 cups (over 80% of our inventory) through customers either keeping or losing the returnable cups. While overall this model is unsustainable, we did exceed the 85% return rate which hit and exceeded the carbon neutrality threshold.

Overall, we did still maintain a positive carbon impact, but when including operational efforts to retain, clean and redeploy the cups, we’ve found that moving instead to more sustainable disposables is a better fit for our business model. While the returnable cup system has proved effective in many other businesses, on reflection these are far more closed-loop systems - single cafes where customers will always return a cup before leaving the site.

Due to the spread-out nature of our campus, as well as the routine of students and staff, who will not necessarily be on-site in the same place every day, the system simply isn’t built to fit the way our customers operate. We continue to investigate other options to reduce single-use items across our operations, and to find more sustainable alternatives to those that are crucial to our current way of working.

We have already sourced and introduced a more sustainable alternative to our existing disposable cups; phasing in new stock to The Roastery as the trial ended. The Good Cup is a lid-free disposable cup, free from plastic lining or accessories – making it biodegradable, compostable and recyclable.

Made from agri-waste paper, they have a 28-38% reduced carbon footprint compared to conventional products, and The Good Cup calculate they’ve already saved more than a million trees through using discarded agricultural fibres.

You can already find these cups in The Roastery and, following good feedback from our community and staff, we’ll be rolling them out across the business as our old cup stock runs down.

Much like with our ‘join the green team’ initiative, we will continue to promote and encourage people to bring their own re-usable containers for food and drink across all our outlets while ensuring that the disposable options we provide are as low-carbon and plastic free as possible.