Once I have come across a significant slogan: “Love coffee but care about the environment”. It seems that single-use coffee cups bring great convenience to consumers but create a lot of problems to recyclers at the same time.

The single-use coffee cup is an environmental nightmare. As we know, most of the coffee cups are made of Styrofoam, one of the most widely used plastic types. The good insulation and waterproof performance made it popular to sever as coffee cups. And a cup of coffee in the morning seems to be a must-have for the office workers.

According to statistics, over 60 billion single-use coffee cups enter landfills every year due to the difficulties for recycling. This includes cups sold by all major coffee chains. As a result, many coffee chains restaurants promise to stop using Styrofoam containers in the near future. Major UK chains including Starbucks, McDonalds and KFC signed a paper cup declaration last month promising to increase recycling rates.

Some people point out that, most paper cups are in fact not recyclable. They are usually lined with polyethylene or something similar to make the cup waterproof and hold hot liquid. This can lead to paper cups being impure and difficult to separate, so recycling is not easy.

Although as the raw material of single-use coffee cups, Styrofoam is far from perfect. There are also difficulties for foam cups recycling. Styrofoam is much cheaper than other packaging materials and has good insulation and waterproof properties.

As for the difficulties for recycling, INTCO recycling can provide you with total solutions to Styrofoam recycling. GREENMAX foam densifier is a professional machine for foam cups recycling. The melting process makes the loose foam into dense ingots with the extrusion ratio of 50:1. The melted Styrofoam ingots can not only save transportation costs, but also be easily accepted by recyclers.

Recycling a foam coffee cup every day and making efforts together, there will be a great change in the future. Anyway, recycling is what we strive for all our lives.