“TU/e claims to be a sustainable university, but you’d never know it from the quantity of paper coffee cups that are thrown away every day.” So says Anik Jacobsen, president of the CU/p team - which incidentally has no official status at TU/e. Together with Paolo Berizzi, Núria Casals, Alex Neculai and Marc Lenz (students of Data Science and Embedded Systems), she is trying to change the mindset of the TU/e community.

The team members see it often enough on campus: a pile of empty paper coffee cups accumulating on students’ study desks during the course of the day, while a single coffee cup would have been enough if they’d chosen to reuse.

Win a reusable cup

To make students and employees aware of this, the team members have set up the #Ibringmycup challenge. This initiative, which runs from February 3rd through 10th, is intended to motivate everyone in the TU/e community to bring their own mug. The team is hanging up posters and is promoting the initiative on social media. What’s more, they are running a competition in which students and employees can win a reusable cup.

The CU/p team’s chief aim is to create awareness of this situation. After the challenge week, the team members plan to see how the mountain of waste paper cups can be further reduced. They have already made contact with those responsible for TU/e’s waste policy and been in touch with the GO Green Office. The latter started a similar initiative in 2018 when it introduced reusable festival cups at TU/e.

It should be said that not only coffee cups but also coffee grounds are collected separately at TU/e, as mentioned in this article on waste collection published recently by Cursor. Since 2016 the coffee dispenser company Maas has been doing this at the request of TU/e. Coffee grounds now enter the waste stream of organic material. Processing them in this way is the cheaper option and saves TU/e money. The collected cups go to the paper-processing industry, which turns them into toilet paper. 

The TU/e department Facility Services informs us that the number of Maas coffee cups from the coffee machines in 2019 that were used was at 567,182.