COFFEE chains need to do their bit to help York become the greenest city in the North, councillors have said.

Cllr Andrew Waller, the senior Liberal Democrat member of City of York Council behind the One Planet York project, has called on coffee companies to help tackle landfill problems by making their takeaway cups properly recyclable.

Thousands of paper takeaway cups are thrown away daily, and the issue hit the headlines when celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall took it on in his latest “war on waste”.

Although many cups are marketed as recyclable, in reality few can be as only one processing plant in the UK can accept them. Although the cups are made of paper or cardboard, they are coated with laminate, and that has to be removed before the paper can be recycled.

Cllr Waller wants high street chains to work with York and other councils to find a solution and save taxpayers’ money which is spent on landfill tax.

He said: “Many residents think that coffee cups can be recycled and therefore they are mixed with the regular paper recycling. In fact, the design of the cups mean we can not take them as part of our paper and cardboard recycling and they usually end up going to landfill, costing us in landfill tax.

“As a council we are working hard to boost recycling, cut landfill tax and make York the greenest city in the North through the One Planet initiative. However, we need the coffee giants like Starbucks and Costato work with us to find a solution to the coffee cup problem. There are signs they are now taking the issue seriously, but we need them to do more as well as continuing to investigate what we can do.”

He said Rowntree Park Reading Cafe, with its compostable coffee cups, was a local example of good practice. “This shows the big companies could and should be doing more.”

Independent coffee shop owner Chris Hartley, of Croque Monsieur, says there is no overnight solution, with many pioneering products not on the market until later this year, while the existing cups can only be recycled if they are taken to special facilities. "And of course takeaway cups are not all thrown away in the same place,” he added.

However, many shops like his are trying to reduce their environmental impact, by ensuring paper cups come from sustainable sources, bringing in takeaway flasks and offering discounts to the regular customers who reuse them.