Ditch Your Carbon Cup Print

Eirgrid

Eirgrid is the Climate Action and Energy partner to Young Social Innovators empowering and recognising young people's efforts to innovate around climate and energy issues through the sponsorship of this theme and dedicated award.

Ditch Your Carbon Cup Print

CBS Charleville, Co Cork

The Social Issue:

The world’s coffee culture is having a detrimental impact on the environment with one million paper cups a minute across the world being discarded in landfill sites each year. Students also noticed huge quantities of paper coffee cups in their school’s bins, bring the problem closer to home.

The Idea:

Ditch Your Carbon Cup Print was set up with the aim was of reducing carbon emissions locally and nationally by promoting the use of reusable coffee cups. This would hopefully contribute to UN Sustanable Development Goal 13: "Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts". The team organised the first ever ‘Ditch Your Carbon Cup Print’ week in the town of Charleville, where consumers were encouraged to use their own cups instead of paper ones when buying take-away drinks. To encourage people to use a reusable cup, local businesses gave a discount to those who supplied their own cup. The team created and distributed informational material and the campaign received extensive local media coverage in The Corkman and The Limerick Leader.

We had to do something to raise awareness about the individual’s carbon footprint associated with this daily habit of having a coffee

The Impact:

The team contacted politicians for advice on how to expand their project and their research led them to the US where they sourced a reusable, collapsible cup. The team are eager to present their model to the Department of the Environment and the Environmental Protection Agency to instigate a national rollout of this campaign.