Congratulations to Auto Vending on its 20th Anniversary in publishing – keeping us all up to date with the latest trends in the vending industry.

In this month’s issue I was pleased to see that The Save a Cup Recycling Company has opened its first dedicated waste sorting and bailing centre and has launched new schemes for recycling vending cups and other disposables. The new LOOP and LOOP Plus schemes will remove and recycle all drinks vending waste, not just cups. Waste collected from vending clients will be delivered to the new Save a Cup sorting centre which is staffed by people with disabilities and disadvantages for sorting into refined waste streams for recycling.

At a Nuffield Private Hospital recently I clocked the free water and hot beverage machines alongside the vending machines in the waiting area. If you think most people will go for at least a cup of water and or a hot drink in the 10/15 minutes waiting to see their consultant – without being pedantic on the maths – I am glad that I am not the one sorting through the recycling bins at the end of the week. The LOOP PLUS scheme is a scheme designed for clients who would prefer to have just one bin for cups, cans, bottles and other waste and hand over the sorting and separating to Save a Cup.

According to Waste Watch, recycling two glass bottles saves enough energy to boil water for five cups of tea. I got in touch with Save a Cup for some other juicy recycling facts so here goes on the stuff we really do need to care about:

• Polystyrene can be recycled up to 20 times without any damage to its physical properties. It is very easily recycled – Plastics Europe.

• Recycling plastics reduces landfill, oil use and energy use making for a more sustainable process than manufacture from virgin material.

• 52% of commercial and industrial waste was recycled or reused in England in 2009, up 10% on 2002/3 – Defra website.• UK Recycling saves the 18 million tonnes of CO2 each year – the equivalent of taking 5 million cars off the road – RecycleNow.

• Save a Cup recycle over 100 tonnes of cups a year. It’s hard to say what a cup weighs but a safe guess would be that they collect more than 30 million cups each year.

That might sound like a lot of cups but about 2.5bn paper cups are disposed of each year and a similar volume of PS06 and PP05 cups are also disposed of and land filled. Save a Cup is really only starting to chip away at this volume!

Save a Cup provides the only scheme that actually recycles cups. Other recyclers collect them, but typically they are ignored in favour of premium materials like cans, PET and HDPE. Save a Cup recycles all of the cups it collects in a fully audited process. As a not for profit company the charges applied for the service are only to help cover the cost of running the scheme. You can sign up to join the scheme or encourage your clients to by going to www.saveacup.co.uk.

Size matters Meanwhile over at International Paper Foodservice they are urging vending operators to consider changing the existing 7 oz. plastic cup to an 8 oz size paper cup in line with the high street offering. 12 oz is already out there but it makes sense to go the extra and also in cup quality to enhance the coffee experience. This makes good business sense in my opinion and I believe that the changeover (according to Mike Gardner, sales and marketing director) is quite straight forward as their 8oz paper cup has a 73mm diameter so can be used in the 7oz Squat cup units without the need for splitter modifications. I am no expert in this field so I suggest you give Mike a call talk to your current vending operator if you want to join the cup size ‘revolution’.

What’s in a name – £££ With the Coffee Nation self-service coffee kiosks being rebranded as Costa Express the power of a successful brand is yet again evident with the company seeing an increase already by 30% since the change in branding. Well, you can’t go wrong with a cup of Costa can you but what is so interesting for marketers like me is that once you create a strong and successful brand – creating a sub brand that becomes just as strong is a moment to savour. Just by adding the word Express – the customer knows already what to expect – quality coffee on the go – brilliant. I wonder how many food and drink suppliers in the UK could replicate this brand within a brand adding value for both consumers and retailers?

Paper cups become a work of art I bet no one in the industry has come up with such a novel way of storing cups as Sculptor Will Nash and students from a school in Brighton. Working on an educational Mathematical project – Will got students working out their sums using paper cups and I don’t know about you but I think what they created was amazing! My photos were taken when the installations were hung to be admired in the foyer of the Brighton University Sallis Benney Theatre Building. Nash works with schools, corporates and the public sector at creating sculptures for public spaces www.willnash.co.uk.

Self serve solutions – enhancing the experience If you need some advice on styling your vending area with vending housings and ideas on how you can cleverly house recycling bins in your vending area or breakout zone please get in touch with me karen@tastemodern.com to see how we can enhance the experience for your customer in serving up their cuppa.