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Why we started this company?
Eco Enviro Concepts™ found from our own research that most people drink about 3 cups of take away coffee a week as a minimum.
Also, we learned that many of the disposable cups eventually end up in the bin at home, at work, or in public places.
We wondered why this was the case, when coffee cups are mostly recyclable. We discovered that the main reason was that they have a small amount of plastic that can be tricky to separate. Once we worked that out, we knew there needed to be an environmentally friendly way to use these waste products.
Our current economy relies heavily on finite resources, many of which simply end up in landfill. As a designer I challenged myself to think of a product that doesn’t produce rubbish at the end of its life cycle and is part of the ‘circular economy’. This concept encourages businesses to create products that do not require the extraction of new resources. Eco Enviro Concepts goes even one step further than that.
It takes rubbish and turns it into a product that helps create new life by growing plants from seeds using the recycled paper from coffee cups.( Flavia Guardia CEO)
The process of growing plants from our products is very straightforward. You just need to spray the ‘seed starter’ with a little bit of water each day and see the plants grow after 2-3 days.
After sprouting, the seedlings can be nurtured in a larger pot, or planted in the ground so the roots of the plant can continue using the cellulose of the paper and eventually, fully composting the product, leaving behind healthy plants.
You may think, “But coffee cups aren’t fully recyclable”. That is generally true. Most people ask us about what happens to the plastic in the cups. Well, we work to separate the plastic liners from the cups to recover the paper before creating our seed starters. The lids are kept separate.
What do we do with the plastic?
Because we have other waste material from the cups, the plastic liners and lids, we only can recycle this plastic waste. It doesn’t decompose. we are collecting this waste material to create new collection stations, where people can drop off the cups and lids in separate compartments.
In the last few years, the disposable cup industry has come up with some new environmentally friendly options, there are now cups that use “compostable plastic from PLA”. Unfortunately, the term ‘compostable’ is used quite loosely in this case, and businesses often think they are doing more for the environment just because their cups are labelled as ‘compostable’. They are, but these cups require a special process in an industrial composting facility to decompose completely. This process includes 120 days in continuous 60-degree heat. Throwing these cups into landfill does not automatically lead to them breaking down.
The process is still difficult and expensive. It is also not easy for people to follow without the right education about the product’s lifecycle.
These started are the answer of the problem with these kinds of cups as well.
Our collection stations collect all kinds of disposable paper coffee cups.
We acknowledge that there are other kinds of paper cups that exist and hope to one day do more. For the moment, we are focusing on paper coffee cups because they are made from high-quality paper. Most cups are made of 95% of this paper and about 5% plastic.
Because the quality of this paper is high and rich with cellulose, you can germinate all types of seeds, you can find in our product range all kinds of herbs, veggies, flowers and native grass.
Check out our products and grow some beautiful plants saving coffee cups from landfil!.
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..."Any material can be recycled, essentially a material is recyclable if there is a production circuit that can be taken as an input and it's value perceived as an economic input..."
