What you have achieved in the past year!
How you’ve helped create change on campus
Over the last year, our customers have made a real difference by choosing to reuse, recycle properly and support greener products across campus. Let’s take a look at what you’ve helped us achieve, and how we can do even more together.
In just the last 12 months, customers who have brought their own reusable cups to our cafés helped us save:
- 81kg of plastic
- 231.88kg of timber
- 2,017kg of CO2e emissions
To put that into perspective, that’s the same as driving 10,506 miles in a petrol car. That’s Cardiff to Sydney, Australia, winding through Europe, Asia and down through Indonesia!
Now, let’s double that and aim to get back home too – but we can’t do this without your help.
So far this academic year, we’ve noticed that the number of our customers bringing their own cups has dropped. Last year, 34% of our customers were using reusable cups, that’s now 32%. So if you’ve slipped back into the disposable habit, it’s time to get back on track.
Did you know that ALL hot drink disposable cups must be thrown into general waste?
No matter how eco-friendly they look, every coffee shop disposable cup has different packaging, with layers of cardboard and plastic, which are often contaminated by food, making it unrecyclable just like your pizza and burger boxes.
Act now! Bring your own reusable cup and help reduce your impact on the environment. Not got one? We’re extending our half price KeepCup offer until the end of May 2025 to help you get on board.
🥤That means you can get a Cardiff University KeepCup for just £4.50 until the end of May!🥤
What else have we done?
In 2018, Cardiff University pledged to remove single-use plastic from campus and CUFoods has been hard at work to reduce the plastic packaging in our cafés and restaurants to inside our kitchens.
In 2018, 87% of drinks in our fridges were in plastic packaging. By 2025, we’ve reduced that to just 22%!
Here’s how we did it:
- Providing free tap water in all of our outlets so you can refill your bottles
- Swapping from plastic bottles to cans and glass wherever possible, including introducing Fairtrade drinks like Karma and LemonAid
- Choosing plastic products made from recycled plastic when alternatives aren’t yet available
Speaking of packaging, another key area where you can make a big difference is by recycling properly. Did you know that if you put the wrong packaging into the wrong bin it contaminates the whole bag of recycling? That means if a can accidentally goes into the plastic recycling bin, the entire bag may have to go into general waste.
That’s why it’s so important to use the bins correctly – so which packaging goes where?
