Latte levy debate littered with half-truths

The battle over the Government’s proposed 20-cent “latte levy” on disposable cups is going right down to the wire with both sides trying to play the green card — sometimes with less than rigorous attention to detail.

Environmentalists argue that Irish consumers dispose of 22,000 coffee cups every hour of the day. If it’s that big a business, you can see why the packaging industry would be so keen to protect its corner. But the strength of the argument was somewhat undone in a release from a group called Voice, or Voice of Irish Concern for the Environment, which on Monday totted the figures up to a grand total of 200 billion discarded cups a year — out by a small multiple of a thousand.

It also sought to conflate the detritus of the coffee-on-the-go market with the €1,600 a ton that it says the Irish taxpayer pays to dispose of on-street waste. Coffee cups may be an environmental nightmare but it’s a reach to say they are the dominant feature of on-street litter

For their part, Retail Excellence Ireland says that reusable coffee cups are generally made from plastic which is “clearly harmful to the environment”. Single-use cups, it argues, are compostable and will degrade naturally.

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On the surface that’s all quite true. Plastic is not great for the environment but then if we look at the manufacturing processes for all those single-use cups, and their generally plastic lids, good and evil are not quite so clearcut anymore.

The group that speaks for the cafe industry is also fond of quoting a study by Danish consultancy Ramboll, concluding that switching to hard plastic “keep cups” would result in the use of 3.6 times more water and 2.8 times more carbon than compostable single-use cups.

This Ramboll study is a source of much contention, and not just to the people over in Voice. Those who have tried say it is not just difficult, but impossible, to get a copy of the full study. But even from the details that are available, it seems the study refers to recyclable paper cups, not the compostable ones that Irish cafe industry lobbyists want to use the report to defend.

How important is the ‘latte levy’ to our climate goals?

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It also apparently did not examine the “on-the-go” market, the driving force behind the new levy, nor look at the impact of the plastic lids and it assumed an aspirational 30 per cent recycling rate that seems as far-fetched as some of the numbers in the Voice release. In other words, the Ramboll study may have something to say about paper packaging recycling but very little about the Irish latte litter issue.

Oh, and one more thing: the study was paid for by the European Paper Packaging Alliance, so its status as independent research is about as tarnished as one of those cups thrown casually at the kerbside.

It seems facts and transparency are nearly as hard to come by in this debate as a decent cup of coffee.