Reusable cup scheme goes green

COFFEE drinkers can turn their takeaway cup of the black stuff green following the launch of a new swap-and-go coffee cup scheme last week.

In partnership with the City of Greater Bendigo, Green Caffeen supplied more than 15 cafes across the city with their reusable cups and the company’s founder Damien Clarke said café-goers can easily get on board with the system.

“We’ve designed Green Caffeen to be a simple swap-and-go reusable cup scheme that ensures people have access to a clean, green, reusable coffee cup no matter where they go and particularly here in Bendigo,” he said.

“All you do is download an app, walk into one of the fantastic cafes we have here in Bendigo, you scan the code, you check out your coffee and that enables you to actually repeat that process throughout any of the cafes across Bendigo.”

Customers can return their used cups to any participating café for cleaning, and the system allows for a second cup to be checked out if people forget to return their one already on-loan.

“We worked out with BYO cup culture you had generally forgotten your cup at one stage so we actually built an insurance policy on the second cup into the phone so you can always have two Green Caffeen cups on the go at any particular time,” Mr Clarke said.

The Australian owned and operated system runs at no cost to cafes or customers as long as the cups are checked back in within 30 days.

Mayor Cr Jennifer Alden said this was an important consideration for the City as the first local government in Victoria to partner with Green Caffeen.

“Increasingly, we need to think about how we can reuse, repurpose, upcycle and generally avoid throwing things away because there won’t be places like landfills forever,” she said.

“We know we’ve got a great coffee culture locally and now we can access the use of reusable coffee cups at no charge to help us change our habits for the better.”

Owner and manager of participating café Pogo Espresso Alex Davis said he felt good about joining the system and is confident his customers will use it.

“People just need to have it made easy for them,” he said. “Everyone’s on their phone with an app anyway, they’re sitting in the shop on their phone, they may as well just scan a QR code and just grab a reusable cup.”

“This should help make it easy for people to get on board. They might not think they need something like this but once they see how easy it is then hopefully that works for them.”