1. ‘The last straw’ Tackling plastic waste at The University of Winchester.

2. It all started with coffee cups

3. The 25p surcharge November 2016
Prices of all hot and cold drinks dropped by 25p
25p ‘reintroduced’ as a surcharge
Clear messaging across campus
Results showed that people quickly adapted and switched to bringing a reusable cup to avoid paying the surcharge.
Catering manager was committed to using the word surcharge, not tax or levy. Caused some minor confusion for students on the intranet!
Reusable cup sales (disposables saved)
Percentage of sales in reusable cups
Pre-intervention: 03/10/ /11/16
689
3.78%
1) 25p surcharge: 07/11/ /02/17
9,410
21.13%
Total
10,099

4. The reusable cups

5. The results
61,363 cups saved by start of June Reusable cup use/sales remains at around 30%
“Results are in line with prospect theory, which suggests that people are more sensitive to losses than to gains when making decisions. A charge on disposable cups (a loss) in addition to the price of a coffee is therefore more likely to produce behaviour change than a discount (a gain) on a reusable cup.”
A word about impact on sales…
We’re working on reusable cup uptake for cold drinks and ordered catering
And watching the recyclable cup market closely
In terms of potential impacts on sales:
“We started the intervention on the 6th November 2016 and that ran through the remainder of the academic year 16/17
The total coffee/hot drink sales for 16/17 were up by 7.5% on the previous academic year 15/16 so no effect.
Comparing August to December 16/17 and 17/18, the overall sales are up by 2.5%. So although not as big an increase as the previous year there has been no backlash against the tax as overall sales continue to increase.
Regarding costs. We charge a 25p tax for taking a single use cup. The overall cost of cup, lid and the sleeve is around 13p per hot drink sold, so effectively each reusable cup actually costs the department 12p of the profit from each hot drink.”
So, whilst there is potential for a minor impact on profit per drink, this doesn’t necessarily translate to profit margins overall if sales keep increasing.
Grundon MRF £1 million investment to separate out coffee cups of the DMR
Simply Cups - hmmm
Square Mile Challenge – April Leafield, Hubbub etc partnership with organisations within the City Of London – aimed to collect half a million cups per month. 4 million collected in a year. 7 Giant yellow bins on the street for a month, 100 recycling receptacles inside business and organisations
Not as many on the streets – people take them inside.
Actually used 114,844 disposable cups in the outlets (total daily sales of single use coffee cups). The other 76,156 were used elsewhere in the Uni including through ordered catering!

6. It’s gone coffee cup crazy

7. The Final Straw

8. Water. Reusable bottles. Refill

9. Coca-Cola Freestyle
Around 650,000 plastic bottled drinks are used across the University’s Whiteknights and London Road campuses each year. To reduce the volume of plastic used on campus, the University is this week launching the Sustain It bottle – a reusable bottle that uses technology to offer students and staff a range of vending machine drinks.
The Sustain It bottle contains a microchip that allows users to pre-pay for drinks either in multiples of 10 (£12) or unlimited use for an academic term (£39.95). Most of these will be zero and low-calorie options. Free filtered water will also be available at each machine, allowing students and staff to fill any bottle at no cost – a service that has been requested by students.
The 591ml bottle is designed to be used at the new range of Coca-Cola Freestyle machines, offering more than 100 drinks and custom mixes. Using the Freestyle App on a mobile phone, consumers can select and save their preferred mix, ordering at the machine by scanning a code from the app.

10. Other plastic waste

11. A word about compostable packaging

12. Forget recycling plastics. Incinerate the lot. Or not.

13. Thoughts, comments, questions
@Environment_UoW