‘It was a plague’: A blanket ‘bring or buy’ reusable scheme has been introduced in the town, which was getting through 23,000 cups a week
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Killarney used to accept it as a price of being a tourist town: ubiquitous disposable coffee cups spilling from bins, littering roads and blighting the area’s national park. The County Kerry town went through about 23,000 cups a week – more than a million a year – adding up to 18.5 tonnes of waste.
Not any more. Three months ago, Killarney became the first town in Ireland to phase out single-use coffee cups. If you want a takeaway coffee from a cafe or hotel, you must bring your own cup or pay a €2 deposit for a reusable cup that is returned when the cup is given back.
The results are evident in bins, which now seldom overflow, and on streets and forest trails where it is rare to see abandoned cups.
“It was a plague on the town and countryside,” said Michael Gleeson, chair of the group Killarney Looking Good, that promotes civic improvements. “This was a wonderful and necessary initiative. The amount of cups strewn around is considerably reduced.”
On a stretch of the N22 road to Cork, Gleeson used to pick up five or six cups, now he tends to find just one, if any.
Other Kerry towns, including Tralee and Dingle, are considering emulating the experiment, and the hope is that it will spread across Ireland and beyond, said Gleeson. “Our great challenge is to make our world more beautiful.”
