Why Did We Give up on the Reusable Coffee Cup?

Once upon a time, you’d be considered a planet-hating freak if you didn't have one. Now no one would even notice. What's changed?

There was a time when you’d walk into the office, KeepCup in hand, and get a real sense of satisfaction. You might nod smugly in recognition at a colleague's reusable cup, or frown at a disposable vessel your boss had dared to bring into work. And you might, if you remember, have tut-tutted (and most likely, sniggered) when Boris Johnson had a paper cup snatched out of his hand by an aide – as if that of all things would shatter his reputation.

Now, though, none of that is true. As I hop between coffee shops and observe customers queuing to satisfy their caffeine craving, the reusable cups have pretty much vanished. In one shop, only a few people whip out a KeepCup or similar. Admirable. In another, not a single one makes an appearance. For some reason, almost every coffee or tea drinker is making do with single-use cups. So, what has changed since the heady days of October 2019, when the prime minister wouldn't have been seen dead with one?

As you probably noticed (and in all likelihood got on board with), there was a huge surge in the use of reusable cups between 2017 and 2019. Argos reported a massive 537 percent increase in portable cup sales, and the government even hinted at a tax on their single-use counterparts.

But with the onset of pandemic restrictions in March 2020 came fears around germs, with most cafés refusing to serve drinks in anything non-disposable, regardless of whether it had been washed. And while that may seem a long time ago now – indeed, KeepCup insists that sales have increased slightly since the end of lockdowns – the trend has continued. You may well own a reusable cup, but chances are that right now, it's sat collecting dust in your kitchen cupboard.

Just consider the stats. One survey of 2,000 adults by health company Essity found while 39 percent of adults may own a reusable cup, a whopping 79 percent admitted leaving it at home ‘on multiple occasions’. Meanwhile, in another poll by environmental organisation Hubbub, which was shared with Time Out, 3,000 people around the UK were quizzed on their use of single-use packaging in June 2022. The results showed that, of the 78 percent of respondents who buy hot drinks, more than half use a single-use cup at least once a week and only 4.6 percent said they use exclusively reusable cups.

Gavin Ellis, Hubbub's director and co-founder, blames the pandemic. The lockdowns changed our habits in many ways, and Ellis says that hygiene was the main thing discouraging those surveyed from switching to reusables, with 22 percent saying that they were worried about catching Covid. He says that ‘although these hygiene concerns aren't necessarily applied to other behaviours – for example, people don't have an issue with reusing ceramic cups in a café or glasses in a pub – it is clearly a barrier for many people.’

The dawn of hybrid working also led to a huge drop in the number of people commuting five days a week, which means fewer people using reusable cups on a consistent basis. Add that to the fact most cafés refused to serve their hot drinks in reusable vessels for at least two years and you get swathes of drinkers resorting back to single-use. Ellis concludes that, since then, ‘the habit simply hasn't been reformed’.

Howey Gill is the head of coffee at London-based coffee chain Grind. He says his company is yet to see the reusables trend bounce back, but adds that, even pre-pandemic, pushing customers towards KeepCups proved a challenge. ‘Even with reward-based schemes, such as reduction in cost, it never seemed to catch on,’ he says.

Many of the big national chains run similar schemes. Starbucks offers a 25p discount for customers who bring their own cup and charges 5p extra for those who don't, while Pret offers a whopping 50p reduction. However, Nichola Raihani, professor of evolution and behaviour at University College London, says a discount may not be effective because it is seen as a gain (money earned) rather than a loss (money lost) and that the brain ‘places about two times more weight on losses than it does on gain’.

This means that customers could be more likely to bring their own takeaway-coffee cups if they were charged extra for single-use cups (which would be seen as a loss). Indeed, Professor Raihani notes that this worked incredibly well in the phasing-out of single-use plastic bags. ‘Financial incentives can be really effective in signalling the right thing to do, but more fundamentally in actioning that loss frame in the brain because people are quite sensitive to that sort of thing,’ she says.

Humans are pretty simple creatures, so it's probably not all that surprising that the factor most likely to sway caffeine buffs towards regular KeepCup use is whether or not they see others doing it. According to research published in The Conversation, customers only have to see a significant number of other people using their own cup before they decide it is the more socially acceptable option and feel comfortable doing it themselves.

And likewise, when some people stop using them, others may well follow. Professor Raihani says: ‘Seeing what other people are doing signals towards what the desirable behaviour is in a situation where we’re not really sure and helps us to understand what the normative thing to do is. Everyone's much more aware of germs and contamination and I wonder whether there's been an unspoken change in what we think of as acceptable to do since the pandemic.’

More than 600 people told Hubbub in that survey that Covid led to such a huge increase in single-use plastic use that they no longer felt like their actions would make a difference. But what impact do KeepCups have anyway?

François Saunier of CIRAIG, a sustainability research institute, told Time Out in 2021 that you would need to reuse cups up to 250 times to offset the carbon footprint of their production and the resources needed to clean them, and make them ‘environmentally preferable to single-use cups’.

Fifty-nine percent of participants in the Hubbub survey also agreed that they have no issue with single-use packaging if it can be recycled. However, their perception of what can and can't be recycled might be slightly warped. While most coffee shops now offer single-use cups that claim to be widely recyclable and biodegradable, the labelling can be rather misleading. Even if they are predominantly made of paper, these cups still have to have a thin plastic lining to ensure that they don't dissolve to brown mush when liquid is poured in. The result is that most of the 2.5 billion cups that the UK throws away each year ultimately end up in landfill.

The question now is whether reusable cups have any chance of being revived to match their supposed glory days. Professor Raihani thinks so: ‘We could get back into the old norm if we’re given the right shove to do it.’

But as it happens, the KeepCup hype of 2018 and 2019 might have tricked us into thinking more people were using reusables than actually were. According to Euronews, only 5 percent of coffees sold in the UK in early 2020 were not in single-use cups. There are a few shops, including Monmouth Coffee and Boston Tea Party, that run loan schemes for reusable cups instead of expecting customers to bring their own. However, when the latter banned single-use from its premises in 2019, it suffered a £250,000 drop in revenue.

Many things Boris Johnson said and did as UK prime minister have aged badly. But the disposable-cup incident seems particularly bizarre now. The long-term effects of the pandemic and WFH culture have largely been pretty hard to pin down, but they could well have killed off the reusable coffee cup.

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