The Good Cup is a fully recyclable, compostable coffee cup which does not need a lid and therefore reduces the everyday plastic waste which is produced through the use of common takeaway coffee cup lids. The Good Cup was designed by Choose Planet A, a company which was founded with sustainability at the forefront of their priorities.

The project was developed over about a “three years” course says Cyril Drouet, who designed the cup. Drouet says it took “about 1,000 handmade samples” in order to ensure that the folding design of The Good Cup worked efficiently. The folding design means that this cup no longer needs a plastic lid, the cup folds at the top which makes pouring, drinking and re-opening easy.

The original design follows the company’s vision to bring “truly sustainable and innovative solutions to help protect our planet”, as mentioned on their website. Along with the development of The Good Cup, Choose Planet A has also included a calculator on their website which shows that currently humans produce 440 million tons of plastic waste every year. Through using the calculator, research compared this statistic to how much plastic waste we’d produce if humans used 10 billion Good Cups rather than regular coffee cups which include plastic lids and plastic-coated paper. The result on the calculator shows that this would have an affect of saving over 47,000 tons of plastic.

The next steps for Choose Planet A are to provide “non-plastic, biodegradable, compostable, and recyclable solutions in paper stream for the entire packaging chain of supply in order to promote, support, and inspire top-down solutions for the world’s consumers.” A goal that they have already started to achieve with The Good Cup which is a step towards creating “packaging that protects our planet.”