• Coffee cups being trialled in home composting option
By
Lucy Bamford
Intern with Sustainable House
• Different sized Compostable Alternatives Cups on a Coolseat in Chippendale, NSW
Imagine a world where you could put your coffee cup in your home composter and help to continue to grow soil for your garden and create a more sustainable planet and way of life?
This world and dream are one both Coolseats and our friends at Compostable Alternatives share and is why we have teamed up to try and make it a reality.
Compostable Alternatives, like Coolseats, is an Australian owned business located in South Australia that is passionate about reducing environmental impact and they have focused their brand around creating sustainable packaging that can break down in your home composters to do just that. They sell a variety of different products including drink cups, straws, food trays, napkins and more. Their main products are their coffee cups that they have been pitching across Australia, a cool series that you can follow through their Instagram (@compostablealt)!
The whole idea behind the products and the company, as I understand it, is to eliminate the greenwashing that occurs with many “sustainable” takeaway container companies and create a product that can actually breakdown in a home composter so the process of creating a more circular world of waste to compost is easier for customers. This means that these coffee cups should be able to break down in home composters in under 24 weeks! You can find out more about them and their products here.
Food waste and other waste - toilet rolls, newspapers, shredded paper, cornstarch veggie bags, etc - become composted soil in three weeks in coolseats.
We’ll do a follow up note to this post in three weeks, at the end of April, to see if the cups break down in them during the first part of our trial in three weeks.
• Maclaine, Intern with Sustainable House, breaking up the compostable cups into the Coolseat
Equally passionate about creating a greener planet, we have chosen to work with them here at Coolseats to test and see how long their cups take to break down in the composter within the seat.
Compostable Alternatives sent us cups of 6 different sizes, with three various lids of types and sizes to test and track their breakdown process.
After having testing the mugs and having some drinks in the cups, we decided to break apart most of the cups to help aid in their decomposition in the soil but left two full cups and one of the lids to see the comparison of that breakdown instead.
• The full cups and lid after being placed in the compost
• The QR Code of the compostable cup in the Coolseat compost.
We will continue to track the breakdown of the cups in the Coolseats in further blogs and on our social media. By partnering with and supporting other sustainable small businesses, we can all move toward a greener planet with more community connections.
Lucy Bamford,
Intern with Sustainable House