A sustainability group in Bucks is taking part in an international day against disposable coffee cups.

Sustainable Amersham announced it was supporting the ‘No Disposable Cup Day’ today (October 4), a global awareness day encouraging consumers to adopt more environmentally friendly habits.

A campaigner for the group Jane Barnes said: “Currently in the UK we use more than 7 million single use coffee cups every day. Sustainable Amersham wants this to change.

“So either bring your own cup, dine in or see if the cafe offers a borrow or cup return scheme, which is now available in some towns across the UK.”

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She said she hoped Amersham to become a town with a cup return scheme to help people adopt a “reuse habit for their drinks.”

Around 2.5 billion coffee cups are thrown away after use each year in the UK, which is enough to stretch around the world five and a half times, research by the House of Commons said.

An estimated half a million cups are littered into the environment every day and only around 1 in 400 cups are recycled. 

Most disposable takeaway cups can be difficult to recycle due to the use of cardboard with a plastic lining, which means only very few companies have processes to separate the materials to enable recycling.