West Cork Tidy Towns team up for sustainable coffee cups

TWO Tidy Towns organisations came together to find a creative solution for an ongoing issue, the amount of takeaway coffee cups discarded in their villages.

Mary Crease from The Ahiohill Tidy Towns told The Echo: “every year we do a sustainability project, we all come up with ideas, and one thing we do regularly is litter picks - always picking up coffee cups.

They came up with the idea of designing their own reusable cups, but despite the many paper cups littering the village, there was nowhere in Ahiohill that sells coffee, so they approached Ballineen and Enniskeane, their nearest neighbours to see if they would like to join together.

The next step was getting a logo designed to include on the cup, as Ballineen and Enniskeane had one already, so Mary got onto the artist Emma Jane Rushworth who designed the village’s hare statue, and she sent a PDF drawing of the hare for the logo.

The cups were made by Down2Earth in Cork, who put the design together with the two logos, and Mary explained they chose the colour green for its associations with sustainability, which is at the heart of their project.

The cups were debuted on Sunday December 10 at the Christmas fair in Ballineen, with Cork South West TD Christopher O’Sullivan and Orla Cronin, a Cork camogie player from the locality officially launching the project.

“It was a great project,” Mary said, adding that it was lovely to work with the other Tidy Towns group on the initiative.

The cups are for sale in the village store in Ballinascarthy, Hillside Coffee in Ballinacariga, Foleys in Ballineen, Bandon Co-op in Enniskeane and Drinagh pharmacy in Ballineen.

They cost just five euro each, with Mary explaining “I want the person who goes in somewhere to buy their coffee and a sandwich then throws the cup out the car window when driving up Keel Hill to buy one of these instead.”