Almost three billion plastic coffee cups are consumed in Germany per year. Can’t recycle them. So what to do? The environment Minister has an idea.
“In Germany has adopted a disposable mentality,” says environment Minister Svenja Schulze of the SPD. You can disagree with. The social Democrat is now in your Ministry in front of many cameras and comes with impressive Figures of the Federal Environment Agency, you could also say, with frightening Figures of 320,000 disposable plastic cups for coffee use the German – per hour. And the every day.
A little over half of these cups are made of plastic-coated paper, the Rest is completely made of plastic. All of these mugs, there are a whopping 2.8 billion per year, is in common is that they are not meadows recyclable, end up in the trash, in the combustion, or, as Schulze says: “…in the, in the environment, on the beach, and most recently in the sea!”
“Coffee to go” has only existed for 23 years
“It has made a disposable mentality!”: Environment Minister Svenja Schulze (SPD)
The only Positive thing about the Numbers: if you have not currently, but for years fairly constant. Even five years ago, around 300,000 of the coffee Cup were made of plastic per hour, over the counter. It is, however, a little over 20 years, then it becomes clear how the culture of everyday life of the people has changed. So Bettina is reported by Rechenberg from the Federal environment Agency, has co-authored the study, in 1996, was first sold in Germany in a “coffee to go”. And she asks: “Often times Coffee to stay instead of Coffee to go!”
30 cents tax per Cup of coffee?
In order to reduce the many plastic waste, the study proposes to collect a levy on disposable cups, about 20 cents on the Cup and 10 cents on the plastic lid. In Coffee Shops and bakeries, supermarkets, and gas stations should also be reusable cups in the future, the rule.
The tax could clean flow also into a Fund that will enable local authorities in the situation, the environment. Without such measures, says Rechenberg, in come the disposable cups are hardly: “disposable cups are cheap, easy to use and quickly disposed of.” Reusable cups, the study recommends, should be used up to ten Times at least and without a lid be used.
EU to ban certain plastic products
What are the plans to implement the measures, the Minister of the environment now, is not quite, but it is important for Schulze: “We are the manufacturer of disposable cups in the future, ask for more to the cashier. The cost can be more on the acuminate, the cause of this.” The presentation of the new study by the Federal environment Agency does not happened coincidentally, on the day the EU decided in Brussels, a new Directive, according to which certain disposable chopsticks should be banned in products such as crockery, Cutlery, drinking straws or cotton plastic from 2021 – and also the many millions of coffee cups are made of pure plastic.
For the Greens, the Opposition group in the German Bundestag, a long overdue step. The group Chairman Anton Hofreiter said: “Still, Germany is the largest packaging waste-producer in Europe. We must, at last, mountains off of this Garbage. The Federal government has the immense waste of energy, cardboard and plastics for coffee cups to finish.”
A Problem especially for municipalities
For the municipalities, the Fund solution would certainly be very attractive, because the disposable cups remain in the end mostly a Problem of urban waste collection: Up to 15 percent of the volume of waste bins on public streets and squares make up the coffee mug now, or the equivalent of eight million full typical trash can just with coffee cups in a year.
That plastic garbage can quite quickly reduce, shows the example of plastic shopping bags three years Ago, I undertook the trade, the amount of plastic bags. Since then, most of the shops charge money for the carry bag. In 2017, every German consumed statistically only 29 plastic seen bags according to 45 the year before.