Wicklow County Council, in collaboration with Greystones Tidy Towns and supported by local cafés and sports clubs, launched the Greystones Cup Campaign on Thursday 12th March at The Grid, Greystones.
Greystones is well known for its thriving café culture, but that daily coffee ritual also creates significant waste. An estimated 3,000 disposable paper cups are used and thrown away in the town every single day. Most of these cups contain a plastic lining, making them extremely difficult and uneconomical to recycle.
The Greystones Cup Campaign aims to dramatically reduce this waste by encouraging coffee drinkers to make one of three simple choices:
- Sit in and enjoy your drink in a ceramic cup
- Bring your own reusable cup
- Use the new Greystones Cup deposit-return system
The campaign focuses on building a simple new habit. Just as bringing a reusable shopping bag has become second nature for many people, carrying or returning a reusable coffee cup can quickly become part of everyday life.
Greystones Tidy Towns has been involved in the campaign from the beginning, drawing on its experience from local litter picking initiatives, helping shape the design and communications around the project, and engaging with cafés and the wider community.
“This is a great step forward in our mission to eliminate unnecessary single-use packaging. Our beaches, parks and open spaces require significant voluntary and council resources to keep clean. If we can encourage more people to sit in or bring their own cup, there will be far fewer disposable cups to clean up. This campaign is about behavioural change, and I am delighted to support it and to acknowledge the effort and collaboration of all those involved.” – Cathaoirleach of Greystones Municipal District Cllr. Lourda Scott.
“We are delighted to launch the Greystones Cup Campaign with the support of Greystones Tidy Towns. The Anti-Dumping Initiative continues to provide valuable opportunities for local authorities to reduce litter. Based on national disposable cup consumption figures, Greystones could potentially be discarding in excess of 3,000 disposable cups per day. This campaign will work to significantly reduce that number.” – Emer O’Gorman, Chief Executive of Wicklow County Council.
“This campaign brings together community groups, local businesses and the Council to address the challenge of litter in our environment. We are very pleased to work with the community of Greystones to support this important initiative and to promote practical climate action at a local level.” – Theresa O’Brien, Director of Services for Climate, Environment, Recreation and Amenity (CERA)
“Greystones is proud of its cafés, its coastline and its community spirit. If everyone replaced just one disposable coffee cup a week with a reusable one, we could stop over 150,000 cups becoming waste in Greystones every year. Together, small habits really do make a big difference.” – Dave Emerson of Greystones Tidy Towns.
Huge thanks to our volunteer team, all in Wicklow County Council, Cllr Lourda Scott, MarketingCoach.ie, and ShareClub for all your work in launching this fantastic initiative. For further information about this campaign, please visit
https://www.wicklow.ie/Living/Services/Environment/Climate-Action-and-Biodiversity/Resource-Management/Greystones-Cup
