The UK's biggest coffee chain, Costa Coffee has pledged to recycle 500 million coffee cups a year by 2020 in a new scheme to tackle plastic waste.
Under the scheme, Costa Coffee would recycle as many disposable cups as it sells in its 2,380 branches.
As a way of encouraging waste collection firms, the coffee chain will pay a supplement of £70 for every tonne of cups collected to waste collectors, plus £5 per tonne to a firm that will check the scheme is running as it should.
This news comes after The Mirror reported that 2.5 billion disposable coffee cups are thrown away each year in the UK, with most not being recycled.
Costa's managing director Dominic Paul said: "By creating a market for cups as a valuable recyclable material, we are confident that we can transform the UK's ineffective and inconsistent 'binfrastructure' to ensure hundreds of millions of cups get recycled every year.
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"One hundred million cups will be recycled this year alone following today's announcement, and if the nation's other coffee chains sign up, there is no reason why all takeaway cups could not be recycled by as early as 2020.
"At Costa we want to guarantee our customers that if they throw their cup into a recycling bin it will get recycled, and today's announcement is a major step towards that happening."
But Costa isn't the only chain to join the motion against plastic waste.
Recently, Italian restaurant chain Carluccio's announced that it is to remove plastic straws from all of its branches.
And last year, Wetherspoons banned plastic straws from all of its UK pubs.
