A tasty solution to packaging waste? Life cycle assessment of edible coffee cups

Edible cups have been proposed as a solution to littering and plastic pollution arising from disposal of 500 billion beverage cups each year. We applied life cycle assessment and a littering indicator to benchmark the environmental performance of edible cups against mainstream cup types made from paper, polylactic acid (PLA), polystyrene (PS) and reusable cups made from polypropylene (PP) and steel. Various end-of-life treatment scenarios were analysed. Across most impact categories, edible cups incur the largest burdens, and reusable cups the smallest (if reused at least 54 times). Under default assumptions, per cup use, climate change burdens ranged from 0.004 to 0.1 kg CO₂ equivalent, eutrophication burdens ranged from 6.26 × 10^–6 to 4.21 × 10^–4 kg N, fossil resource depletion burdens ranged from 0.05 to 0.284 MJ and water depletion burdens ranged from 0.002 to 0.437 m³. However, if edible cups are eaten after use and substitute a similar snack then their use could incur negligible environmental impact. Furthermore, edible cups demonstrate low littering potential and thus could play a role in transition towards more sustainable coffee consumption.