At this year’s London Coffee Festival, we’re encouraging everyone to bring a reusable cup to enjoy coffee tasting, and The Sustainable Coffee Flight. This will help us all reduce and reuse for all beverages consumed on the day. Bring a water bottle too! While the pandemic has given us pause to think about hygiene, reducing plastic waste is something we must make part of our daily routines.

Using KeepCup’s Impact Calculator to run the numbers, we’ve worked out that if all attendees use a reusable cup rather than a single-use cup, collectively we’d save enough energy to make 48,964 shots of espresso! That’s a serious amount of caffeine.
 
The Impact Calculator uses data from a Life Cycle Analysis conducted by Edge Environment and peer reviewed by Eunomia UK. KeepCup’s Impact Calculator quantifies the positive changes we can make when we switch to using a KeepCup. With an estimated 600 billion disposable cups used and discarded to landfill globally every year, it's a great way to understand the aggregate effects of small changes. Did you know that drinking five coffees a week from a KeepCup for a year instead of a single-use cup saves enough plastic to make 90 single-use water bottles?

Doing the work of backing up the principles of reuse with science allows businesses like KeepCup to fully understand the impacts of their production all the way along their supply chain. The Life Cycle Analysis, first conducted in 2018 and updated in 2020, has supported business improvements like solar powered offices and removing plastic packaging at point of manufacture.
 
But your individual impact doesn’t stop there – by choosing to reuse you are also supporting the conservation of the planet through KeepCup’s giving partnerships.
 

 
As a member of 1% for the Planet, KeepCup has donated over £1million to campaigns to preserve ocean and forest habitats. KeepCup was recently recognised by B Corporation as one of the Best for the World^TM for the recognition it has given to the impact of reuse. The company is also a certified Living Wage employer.
 
“In order to live a simple life, you have to minimise the number of things you have, but doing that requires maximising the quality of those things.” Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia
 


For KeepCup, product design must meet four objectives – it must be fit for purpose, made to last and designed for drinking pleasure. The most sustainable products you own, whatever the material, are the ones you use over and over again. 

KeepCup’s Brew Cork has become an iconic product in the specialty coffee industry. By using tempered glass, you can see the magic inside. The cork bands are made by a Portuguese family business using waste by-product of wine cork production.

Head to the KeepCup stand to find out more about their impact calculator and products at the London Coffee Festival 2021.