The Garrick Green Impact team as the London School of Economics focused on single use coffee cups this year for their Green Impact project and have saved a whopping 49,000 disposable cups from being used! 

For the past few years the London School of Economics have innovated their Green Impact toolkit away from individual actions to focus on projects. Projects give teams the freedom and flexibility to tackle the biggest sustainability issues felt by each department and Green Impact projects gives them the support and guidance on how to tackle these issues. 

This year, the Garrick catering team at LSE took on a huge challenge and focused on reducing their single use coffee cup sales and encourage students and staff to bring a reusable cup.

Since September 2018, the team have run awareness raising campaigns targeted at both students and staff and promoted Keep Cups in all of their units across campus. At the start of the new academic year they introduced a 10p levy on single use plastic cups, increased the discount to reusable cup holders to 25p and with funding from LSE Sustainable Futures Fund, offered Keep Cups at the discounted price of �5.00. 

The team have seen an incredible increase in their reuse rate up from 0.03% to 18% in just 5 months! 

The team will continue with their project and be audited by students to see what award they have achieved through Green Impact, but their incredible success in reducing single use plastic just shows that with the right support and tools, any person or team and come together to make a huge difference to the sustainability challenges felt across and organisation.

Congratulations to the Garrick Catering team at LSE! 

You can see our case studies on other institutions and their approaches to reducing disposable coffee cups on campus here. 

"