What better feeling than having a hot cup of coffee on a winter morning? The familiar, dark-chocolatey aroma fills your nose as your lips meet the rounded, paper edge. This simple pleasure brings about one of the recycling industry’s biggest challenges. Contrary to popular belief, paper coffee cups are not just made of paper. The industry standard single-use cup is lined with a thin layer of polyethylene. This common plastic makes it possible for a paper cup to hold liquid and withstand high temperatures. You can find polyethylene in other common plastic items, like or detergent bottles. In those products, it comes in the form of High Density Polyethylene, which is typically easier to recycle than the thin interior lining on paper coffee cups. While it’s technically possible, none of the paper cups sold in New York every day are recycled, according to Muneer Ahmad, the general manager of Pratt Industries Paper Mill. Ahmad has worked at the Staten Island-based recycling facility for two decades. “Whatever goes into our pulper with paper cups comes out of the pulper as reject,” said Ahmad. “They’re not as environmentally friendly as you would think.” Every year in the U.S., coffee shops and fast food restaurants distribute between 52 and 58 billion disposable paper coffee cups, according to a report by Laura Fisher at Tufts University. This amounts to approximately 182 paper cups per person annually. Based on Fisher’s calculations, the 1.6 million people living in Manhattan likely throw away nearly 800,000 single-use cups every day. The numbers are hard to exact, however, as it’s difficult for recycling facilities and garbage collectors to count each cup that ends up in the garbage. “With plastic bindings, it’s a lot more difficult for the paper to break down,” said Sam Silver, education and outreach coordinator at the Sims recycling facility in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The recycling that you put out on your curbside is collected and taken to Sims. They only recycle one third of this waste, and the rest is taken on barges and in trucks to Pratt Industries. The Pratt paper mill receives and processes about 450,000 tons of paper recycling a year (about 1,200 to 1,400 tons a day), according to Ahmad. They produce approximately 380,000 tons of paper using that recycling, but about 65 to 70,000 goes into the reject pile, where all material that can’t get recycled into paper ends up as waste. This includes disposable paper cups. The Department of Sanitation states on its website that paper cups are accepted under what can be recycled as “cardboard.” But according to Ahmad, only a small percentage of the paper in a paper cup is getting recycled. “90 or 85 percent of that one cup gets rejected,” he said. Also, the waste or “reject stream” is made up of far more than just paper cups. If you go to Pratt Industries in Staten Island and observe the large piles of waste on the property, below the seagulls scavenging for scraps of leftover food, you might see plastic garbage bags, food packaging, baby diapers, and a DVD machine. Unrecyclable materials that people mix in with their paper waste. When trash arrives at Pratt, it is unloaded from barges and trucks. Everything then goes through the sorting and pulping process. All of the material that can’t be pulped and later recycled into paper paper is to another Pratt mill in Georgia. There, the waste is incinerated and used as fuel to run that facility. Even though it's rare that paper cups get recycled, it’s not impossible, according to Lynn Dyer, president of Foodservice Packaging Institute, a trade association. “Every facility is going to be different,” she said. “Depending on the temperature they use [during corrugation], depending on the equipment they have, some will be able to process coffee cups and some will not.” She says it’s very hard to understand numbers behind paper cup recycling, as many do not get counted once in the recycling system. The Foodservice Packaging Institute represents roughly 90 percent of the total foodservice packaging industry. Eight of the largest paper cup manufacturers in North America are members of the Foodservice Packaging Institute, according to Dyer. Some manufacturers, like Dart or Genpak, are keen to place a recycling label on their products to portray themselves as more sustainable, said Dyer, but it is hard to meet the Federal Trade Commission’s “Green Guide” criteria. “They are very specific when it comes to how you can label a product,” said Dyer. If something is to be labeled recyclable, at least 60 percent of the U.S. population must be aware that they can recycle that product. Right now, due to a lack of awareness about the recyclability of paper cups, “we are nowhere near that number. Publicly we’ll say [awareness is] lower than 20 percent,” she said. In Dyer’s opinion, the problem lies within a lack of education. In Sarah Currie-Halpern’s opinion, when it comes to New York City, the number of people who care about recycling is outweighed by the people who don’t. “New York is capitalistic. Unless you can provide a model that’s profitable, then people won’t be interested,” she said. Currie-Halpern is the Founder of Think Zero, a consulting group that helps businesses identify their waste production. After conducting a waste audit for one of their clients, a commercial 30 to 40-story skyscraper located in Manhattan’s Financial District, the group found that 2,542 coffee cups were used in one day during May 2017. Currie-Halpern says this is relatively standard for a building of that size. Across the pond, in England, there have been efforts to curb the waste of single-use paper cups. The Environmental Audit Committee, a group within the House of Commons, produced a report in Jan. 2018, outlining the reasons why coffee cups are unsustainable. The committee’s role is to examine how government department’s policies will affect sustainability and the environment, and through this study they are proposing that the U.K. government impose a tax on the disposable paper cups. The “latte levy,” as it’s being called, would introduce a 25-pence charge (equivalent to U.S. 35-cents) on all coffee cups to encourage the use of reusable products. “Most coffee shops have a discount when you bring your own cup,” said Wouter Poortinga, professor of environmental psychology at Cardiff University. Poortinga, in collaboration with Bewley’s Tea & Coffee company, conducted a study in March 2017 that looked at the effects of providing reusable alternatives, and imposing financial incentives to discourage the use of coffee cups. Previously, Poortinga conducted a study on single-use plastic bags, and the results were astounding. The report found that a 5-pence charge on a disposable bag reduced the use of them by 80 to 90 percent, leading to an 85 percent reduction in single-use plastic. “The behavior changed overnight,” said Poortinga. Results from the study on coffee cups were less promising. Putting an additional charge on a cup of coffee showed the researchers that usage was reduced by only 2.5 to 17.5 percent. “It’s far more difficult to adapt to a coffee cup charge,” said Poortinga. He thinks people feel too inconvenienced carrying around a reusable cup. The U.K. population of about 65 million people throws away 2.5 billion coffee cups every year. Only one out of every 400 cups are being recycled, according to the Environmental Audit Committee’s report, and the rest goes into landfill. According to Poortinga, there are a few sites where recycling of paper cups is technically possible, but effectively it doesn’t happen. While a “latte levy” could work effectively to curb the waste issue, Poortinga suspects that the government may not listen to the Enviornmental Audit Committee. “They don’t seem too enthusiastic about the idea,” he said. “Whether the charge on coffee cups would be the best is not in their interest.” In other words, there are bigger fish to fry. Coffee cups make up only one percent of household waste. Additionally, some cafes are reluctant to introduce the charge because they are afraid it will affect sales. According to multiple reports by the BBC, The Independent, and The Guardian, some coffee shops in the U.K. are moving towards using biodegradable coffee cups. However, while they are a more sustainable alternative to the plastic-lined cups, specialist facilities are required to dispose of them correctly. Right now, as is the case in New York, the U.K. doesn’t have a sufficient waste management structure to do that. However, there are increasingly more people trying to come up with inventive ways to combat waste. Loliware, a New York-based startup, produces biodegradable cups and straws that the founders describe as “hyper-compostable” and marine friendly. The cups are made of seaweed, organic sweeteners and fruit and vegetable extract. Not only are the products compostable, but their line of cups can be eaten once you’re done with your drink. While the company’s goal is to find a sustainable solution to single-use plastic products, they emphasize that there is no simple solution to the problem. “From an economic perspective, businesses are not going to choose sustainable solutions until they’re more convenient or less costly,” said Leah Anne Tucker, Loliware’s co-founder. Reducing use of plastic has proven to be more of a priority for some governments. Come July 2018, Seattle will be banning plastic straws entirely. In Taiwan, the government just announced a ban on single-use plastic straws, plastic bags and disposable utensils entirely by 2030. “Government regulations are the best way for sustainable solutions to be implemented,” said Tucker. “It forces business to adopt those initiatives.”