Sick of washing your reusable coffee cup? The Cup eXchange has the answer

Michael Bailey
AFR
November 12, 2018
The days of looking for detergent and a clean brush in the office kitchen to wash your reusable coffee cup may be over.
Start-up The Cup eXchange (TCX) is trialling a new subscription service at the internal cafes of PwC’s offices in Sydney and Melbourne, which for the past eight weeks has seen staff get coffees in a reusable copolymer cup instead of the traditional paper model.
Instead of relying on busy professionals to wash their own cups, they can be returned to the cafe dirty on the next visit, and once an app barcode is scanned to confirm membership, the coffee comes in a new copolymer cup – with the dishwashing left to the cafe.
PwC estimates its on-site cafes nationwide use 450,000 paper cups a year – its fair share of the 1.2 billion discarded in Australia, 90 per cent of which end up in landfill – but TCX says the firm has diverted 25,000 from this wasteful fate in the trial so far.
The start-up is about to try to raise $1.2 million in equity crowdfunding via OnMarket to roll out its subscription service nationally, for which eco-conscious coffee consumers can pay $3 per month, or $6 for three months.
This entitles them to one ‘credit’ reusable cup if they forget to bring the last one back. TCX co-founder Martin Rowell said such forgetfulness had been a barrier to use of reusable cups in the past, as was the inconvenience of having to wash them up.
“You only have the coffee for five or 10 minutes, so to then ask people to carry that cup around, wash it up and remember to bring it back next time is a challenge,” he said.
It is estimated that only 6 to 8 per cent of buyers of takeaway tea and coffee use reusable cups, according to Mr Rowell. He said General Property Trust supplied all of its staff with reusable cups, and a subsequent survey revealed only about 7 per cent were using them all the time.
Meanwhile Lendlease, PwC’s landlord at Barangaroo in Sydney, recently told The Australian Financial Review it had resorted to getting cleaners to wash their workers’ reusable cups, as so few were doing it themselves.
Health and safety
“We see it a bit that someone brings in their plastic cup a couple of times, very enthusiastic, then it’s like – oops, left it in the car, it’s growing mould, I’ll just get a takeaway cup today,” said Ian Hutchison, a manager at Sideways Deli Cafe in Sydney’s inner west.
While Mr Rowell hoped convenience would sell the cup exchange subscription to consumers, the selling point to cafes is that they don’t have to pay for the cups, or give TCX subscribers a discount on the coffee.
“We loved [ABC TV series] The War On Waste, it inspired us to start this, but one thing that show did encourage people to do was take a reusable cup into their local cafe and seek a discount,” Mr Rowell said.
“Cafe owners I’ve talked to are getting bombarded. They’ve been pressured into offering a 20 cent or 50 cent discount for a reusable cup, when a paper cup was only costing them between 8 and 12 cents.”
However, Mr Hutchison said Sideways did not offer a reusable cup discount and he’d never seen a patron demand one.
There is also a health and safety “conundrum” posed by patrons handing over dirty plastic sups, Mr Rowell said, a sentiment echoed by Doug Currie, owner of Hill Street Beans in Sydney’s north.
“[People] don’t necessarily expect us to clean it, but its kind of a suggestion when they hand over a dirty cup,” Mr Currie told the CoffeeBuzz blog, adding that he did offer a 20 cent discount for reusable cups but then fielded complaints from patrons who got a 50 cent discount elsewhere.
A 90-second cycle on the typical cafe’s glasswasher would be enough to clean TCX’s cups, Mr Rowell claimed. Testing of their copolymer material by Eastman, their manufacturer, indicated they could withstand at least 4000 washes, he said.