Stats and Claims

99.75% of disposable coffee cups aren’t recycled

2.5 billion disposable coffee cups are used per year in the UK

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmenvaud/657/657.pdf

Since its invention, 8.3 billion metric tonnes of plastic has been produced globally. 9% of this has ever been recycled. 12% has been incinerated, meaning 79% of all plastic ever created still exists in one form or another in landfill and the environment.

Geyer et al, 2017 http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782.full

“It is estimated that an average of 35.8 million plastic bottles are used EVERY DAY in the UK, but only 19.8 million are recycled each day. This means there are on average 16 million plastic bottles a day not making their way into the recycling bin.”

The Waste and Resources Action Programme (which operates as WRAP, https://www.recyclenow.com/what-to-do-with/plastic-bottles-0

RECOUP (RECycling of Used Plastics Limited) has calculated that UK households use 13 billion plastic bottles a year, including beverage bottles, milk bottles and toiletries bottles.11 Most plastic bottles are made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) whilst milk and toiletries bottles are more usually made from HDPE (high density polyethylene). We heard that, of the 13 billion plastic bottles used each year, 7.7 billion are plastic water bottles. Consumption of water in plastic bottles has doubled in the last 15 years according to the #OneLess Campaign. The average person in the UK will use 150 plastic water bottles every year. In London, usage is 175 plastic water bottles per person per year.

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmenvaud/339/33905.htm#_idTextAnchor009

At Shole, we aim to use zero plastic throughout our supply chain, and actively work with providers to achieve this goal. We choose our service providers with careful consideration of their environmental policies. As an example, we try to use Maersk for our ocean freight (we don’t air freight due to the excessive carbon emissions), in part, due to their partnership with The Ocean Cleanup.

(https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2019/06/25/ocean-cleanup)

We are working towards carbon neutral accreditation by offsetting our emissions with www.carbonfootprint.org

As a new business, we currently don’t have enough data to accurately calculate our annual emissions, so we have offset an estimated figure, and will recalculate based on ‘real’ data once we have it