Case Study
Developing end market demand for recycled paper cups

Collaboration with paper mills to increase acceptance and unlock value

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The Challenge

The to-go paper cup has become a ubiquitous part of daily life for millions of people around the world, with over 250 billion cups being used globally each year. Most of these items end up wasted in landfill, meaning valuable resources are lost rather than repurposed. It doesn’t have to be this way: many paper mills have the technology to process paper cups and consumers in the U.S. overwhelmingly believe the cups can already be recycled in their area — but industry perception that paper cups are hard to recycle means many mills still don’t accept them. Through our work with the NextGen Consortium and the Foodservice Packaging Institute, we identified this dilemma as an opportunity for industrywide collaboration and kicked off a multi-year initiative to increase the acceptance of paper cups for recycling across North America.

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+33%

increase in North American paper mills accepting paper cups

>89%

fiber yield from paper cups tested, well above the 80% needed for mills to accept cups

250B

single-use cups used globally each year

20+

years for a single-use cup to decompose

The Solution

We partnered first with Georgia-Pacific to explore the possibility of accepting paper cups at their mills. After extensive testing, the company announced it would accept these items at mills in Wisconsin and Oklahoma. To bolster the case for accepting paper cups for recycling — and fill a key data gap in the landscape — we commissioned a study with Western Michigan University to analyze the recoverability of paper cups. The results showed that plastic-lined paper cups are much more recyclable than was commonly thought, with the recovered fiber yield significantly exceeding the level paper mills need to profitably process paper cups. We used these findings to guide outreach to paper mills, inviting them to collaborate on cup acceptance, and we published the results in an extensive report with the Foodservice Packaging Institute.

“Based on testing results, we felt confident that cups could be included in our accepted materials list and we were thrilled to have the mill listed alongside others on FPI’s end market map of mills that accept cups.”

— Scott Byrne, Director, Global Sustainability Services at Sonoco

Impact

A year after the report was published, and following our targeted outreach to mills, we announced that ten mills across the U.S. had started to accept paper cups for recycling. With mills in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan and Georgia newly accepting paper cups, the number of mills in North America accepting cups grew by one-third in just four years. This growth will reduce the amount of paper cups headed to landfill and provide valuable materials to make paper-based products such as cardboard and tissue.

Our Role

Research

  • Repulpability testing at mills
  • Partnership with academia
  • Analyses of existing reports
  • Bale composition studies

Design

Build

  • Industry convening
  • Outreach and collaboration with mills
  • Release report to share learnings industry-wide

“Paper cups contain good fiber and are no more difficult to recycle than many of the other prominent packaging categories we see today. We look forward to the value it will bring to our outputs at our mills in Austell, GA and Milwaukee, WI,”

— Jeff Hilkert, VP Paperboard Sales at Greif Mill Group

Read the full report

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We are  part of Closed Loop Partners—which includes the largest privately held recycling company in the U.S. and one of the largest circular economy capital management groups in the world—we’re uniquely positioned to bring research, design, and real-world implementation together.