Nine Alarming Facts about Single Use Cups
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- Disposable paper cups contain 5% polyurethane plastic, making composting and recycling of disposable cups extremely rare
- Half a trillion disposable cups are manufactured annually around the world; that’s over 70 disposable cups for every person on the planet.
- Most plastic used in the world today is for single-use items.
- 4 billion trees, or 35% of the total trees chopped down, are used in paper industries
- 1 tonne of paper consumes 98 tonnes of resources in manufacture.
- Globally, we consume nearly 300 million tonnes of paper each year; most made from virgin pulp.
- Very little recycled paper is used to make disposable cups due to health risk concerns.
- 70% of the world’s paper comes from diminishing forests, not from plantations or recycling
- Consumer waste has increased more than tenfold over the 20th century, from 40kg to 560kg of waste per person, per year.