On Friday, June 16th – World Refill Day – Future Leap café will be giving away free coffees to mark the launch of City to Sea’s Refill Return Cup.
From 9am to 10am, the café (which you’ll find at 1-3 Gloucester Road, BS7 8AA) will offer a free coffee for every customer who uses the new borrowable, returnable and reusable Refill Return Cups.
The Refill Return Cup has been designed as an innovative, eco-friendly way to ensure that Bristolians can still enjoy their takeaway coffees while helping to reduce single-use cup waste. You’ll be able to pick up a Refill Return Cup at participating coffee shops across Bristol – including Future Leap, University of the West of England, Brewnel’s Coffee Shop at St Michael’s Hospital, Small Goods, Small St Espresso, Little Victories, The Canteen, No.1 Harbourside, Barista Coffee Collective, and Mila Coffee in Sparks Bristol.
City to Sea Head of Development, Jane Martin, says, “It’s time to wake up and smell the FREE COFFEE. We can’t keep going as we are with park bins overflowing and our Harbourside littered with floating single-use coffee cups. We need to do things differently. And after years of research we are really delighted to be launching our Refill Return Cup that completely eliminates the need to carry a reusable cup with you. Instead, you can pick one of our reusable cups up anywhere in the city and then drop it off at any participating coffee shop. These will all be mapped on the award-winning Refill app.”
At present, over 2.5 billion takeaway coffee cups are used then disposed of each year in the UK – equating to 10,000 every two minutes. According to City to Sea estimates, 46,000 single-use cups could be saved across the city each week if just one in every ten residents used the Bristol Refill Return Cup. This would add up to an incredible 2.5 million single-use coffee cups each year.
Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, adds, “A year ago I set City to Sea the challenge of making sure that any solution to plastic pollution is accessible to the whole city and they’re rising to this challenge. We’ve now got coffee shops from across the city where you can borrow and return the Refill Return Cups. City stakeholders from UWE to the NHS to small independents are joining forces. This is a One City approach to help make sure that the places we love can stay litter free.”
Using the Refill Return Cup is simple: download the app and register your details, then order your coffee as normal in a Refill Return Cup. The barista will scan your in-app QR code, and you then have 14 days to return the cup to any participating coffee shop – you will only be charged if the cup is not returned. Find out more about the scheme here.