Every hour in Ireland 22,000 disposable coffee cups get discarded. That adds up quickly! In a day, it becomes 528,000. In a year, a staggering 200 million.

Much of this 3,700 tonnes of waste ends up on our beaches and shoreline where discarded coffee cups are among the top five litter items.

The microplastics they break into end up in our food systems and bloodstreams.

In Aarhus, the world's first city-wide recyclable cups scheme has saved hundreds of thousands of them from ending up in landfill, stopping pollutants from leaching into the ground and air.

Instead of chucking them away, locals use one of the 'Reuseable' deposit machines in Denmark's second biggest city to return them and their lids to be washed and sent back to retailers.

It is a simple system and the deposit, around 80p, is returned directly to your bank account via your credit card.

It mirrors Ireland's deposit return scheme for plastic bottles which has generated a lot of backlash in some quarters. But the benefits are already showing,.

Simon Smedegaard Rossau, Aarhus's project manager for circular systems, says: "Our working vision is a city without waste bins. The time is right, no one wants the earth to be polluted by microplastic."

More than 1.25 million cups have been returned so far since the scheme's launch 18 months ago, the equivalent of 10,000 filled bins or 16 tonnes of waste.

It has been so successful, with an 88 per cent return rate, that other cities are keen to follow the model, with Lisbon in Portugal introducing a reusable beer cup scheme earlier this year.

The pilot programme in Aarhus set out to collect 500,000 cups in its first year, but 735,000 were returned, saving 14 tonnes of plastic from incineration and CO2 emissions.

For 2025, the final goal is to collect 1.5 million cups, with an additional 1.5 million planned for the third year of the scheme.

In the pipeline, Aarhus Municipality is looking to expand to other forms of food packaging including takeaway salad bowls.

Simon explained that one of the major factors behind the project was that nearly half of the total waste produced in Aarhus consists of drink and food packaging.

Simon added: "We need to make a mature choice to say we need to take a little bit of space here and there to minimise the growing waste crisis we're seeing in all cities.

"If you're a city official, you need to ask yourself 'Where are we going to put all this waste that's overflowing our streets?'"

Jenni Hume, of Reloop, an organisation that is working with the UK government to accelerate a society free of plastic waste there, said: "Systems designed to keep materials in use again and again help tackle the problems caused by the growing waste from single-use items. Denmark's city-wide reusable cup system has already saved over a million disposable cups from being binned in under two years.

"Circular systems like this are the way of the future."

Does Ireland need a deposit return scheme for its 200 million coffee cups? - Irish Mirror