Coffee isn't an unfamiliar drink for everyone. In recent years, the coffee industry has increased fast. According to global coffee consumption data, the coffee consumption was 10.16 million tons, an increase of 0.7%. As people's living standards improved and deeply knowing about the coffee culture, the consumption of coffee in China also shows an increasing trend. According to statistics, China's coffee consumption was growing at an average annual rate of 15%, which is much higher than the global growth speed of 2%. Moreover, the coffee market will reach a scale of 1000 billion in 2025.

With the rapid growth of the global coffee market, the use of coffee cups is also increasing. According to the report of the British Parliament, about 2.5 billion paper cups were abandoned per year only in Britain. As the coffee culture becomes more and more popular, the need for disposable coffee cups is increasing; there will be 5 billion paper cups abandoned per year within 7 years. As a result, environmental pollution will become more serious gradually. BMG did a survey that interviewed 1500 people and concluded that over half of the interviewers support the coffee cup tax. In addition, the Ireland environment minister announced in 2019 that Ireland would collect tax from consumers who use disposable paper cups to promote the paper cups' recycling and reuse, and to reduce the resources wastes.

Why does the European environmental protection administration promulgate such strict policies on disposable coffee cups? The reason is that this kind of cup is difficult to recycle. People often abandon disposable cups everywhere, which is not easy for centralized processing. Besides, the disposable cup is not totally made of paper, but has a layer of film on its surface to resist water, which is made with plastic and polyethylene. If we want to recycle this kind of cup, we should initially separate the paper and film. However, only two companies have the technology in England, and can only dispose of 500 million cups per year, and no solution for the rest 2 billion cups.

Some coffee leaders take many eco-friendly measures to reduce forest waste to respond to the government, such as encouraging customers to bring cups by themselves or recycle those cups they used, which gained some results. However, according to a report, although 4/5 of consumers are willing to abandon the cups to the recycling box, less than 0.25% of cups were recycled. The reason is, as mentioned before, this kind of cup is difficult to recycle. The only thing they did was the collection.

As a consequence, the ultimate solution to this problem is to change the material of paper cups. In recent years, many pulp molded companies have begun developing biodegradable coffee cups to reduce the environmental pollution caused by disposable cups, made of bagasse, bamboo, and PLA, etc. This kind of product can be 100% biodegraded only under natural conditions. As a leading sustainable packaging company, YUTOECO focuses on researching and developing eco-friendly packaging products, and our coffee cups support 100% biodegradable and compostable.

On 2021 world earth day, Starbucks promoted eco-straws, which adopted advanced processes that integrated the extracted ground coffee and PLA. This kind of product can be biodegraded within 90 days. Furthermore, Luckin coffee also began to provide PLA straws for cold drinks.

Disposable coffee cups were initially used in the early 20th century, and have about decades of history. The environmental pollution and resource waste caused by disposable coffee cups have become more and more serious. Producing and using biodegradable coffee cups has also become more and more important. We believe that biodegradable coffee cups will replace the traditional disposable cups, and become the trend in the coffee industry in the future.