Matcha mania vs plastic waste: Why green tea is fuelling a single-use cup resurgence
Saturday, 7 March 2026
Matcha might be having a moment, yet the mania for the chlorophyll-rich green tea has brought with it a resurgence in the use of that once scorned and environmentally damaging by-product ‒ the single use cup.
For a time Kiwis were extolled to “bring your own” reuseable cup when ordering a takeaway. The keep cup became something of a status symbol, a badge of prestige that could earn a customer a discount. Disposable cups? Kryptonite.
But you would have to have been living under a very large rock not to have noticed the proliferation of clear, domed plastic cups in the hands of generation Instagrammable, their floaty rainbow-hued contents perfect social media fodder.
Long time zero waste campaigner Reuse Aotearoa’s Hannah Blumhardt was behind a 2022 petition, signed by more than 10,000 people, calling for items such as disposable takeaway coffee cups and lids, food containers, cutlery, and single serve sauce pottles to be banned.
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She likens the resurgent throwaway culture (see also bubble tea and icecream) to a social contagion, “as normalised as smartphones, the internet, social media, cars, planes” in a generation which has never known a world without plastic.
Most businesses, she says, still default to single use cups, so reuse is often an exception, not the norm. Where reuse is optional, people tend to follow the path of least resistance ‒ whatever is put in their hand first.
There had also been changes in takeaway drinking culture, with a greater diversity in what was offered and how it was consumed.
“If you look at plastic usage globally it was almost nothing in the 50s. In the last 25 years or so there’s just been an exponential increase … the pace of new products being put on the market is like a tsunami. And the pace of change is like a trickle.
“Whether there’s been an increase or not there’s still mass usage of disposable cups. It is infinitely frustrating.”
New Zealand’s environment of deregulation means it is extremely difficult to know exactly how many single use cups are imported and used in New Zealand on an annual basis. However, figures from 2019 put the number upwards of 295 million every year.
That’s equivalent to filling approximately 1.7 million 120-litre council wheelie bins. Worldwide, many billions of single use coffee cups end up in landfills every year.
Terms like “biodegradable” or “compostable” have little scientific basis; without commercial-level systems to break them down, compostable cups and other products function no differently to any other plastic when sent to a landfill and can take 20 to 30 years to decompose.
And contrary to popular belief and the “light on the Earth” marketing those “environmentally friendly” cups may also contain microplastics or other harmful additives.
“There is a lot of peer-reviewed research on these topics, it's not woo-woo,” says Blumhardt. “I get the feeling that matcha is kind of marketed as a health drink, so perhaps more people would bring a reusable cup if they were aware of the [risks].
“Overseas studies have found that while consumers may have vague subjective understandings about plastic packaging being bad for them, [it] doesn't translate into reliable objective understanding that leads to choices and actions to mitigate exposure.
“It is interesting how people can learn about using a keep cup for one thing (coffee), but struggle to independently translate the same principle to another product in the absence of an enormous campaign effort to point out that a reusable cup can also work for other liquids.”
No go on single use cups
Simon Edmonds has had customers walk out of his café after discovering he doesn’t do disposable.
The owner-operator of Tuatua, on Wellington’s waterfront, ditched single use cups in 2020. “We tried to phase them out. That didn’t work, we were still using too many of them so we just ditched them completely.”
It has been largely successful, he says, despite some walk-offs. “You do get the odd person coming in wanting a takeaway coffee … they claim to be too busy so need to move on.
“The positives far outweigh the negatives as far as I'm concerned. I mean, other businesses in the area don't seem to be selling more coffee than us …”
Still, Edmonds says he has noticed increasing numbers of plastic cups being used elsewhere, possibly because of convenience and cost. Disposables minimise the need for dish washing, hence also reducing electricity and labour costs.
“Just after Covid it seemed we were at a turning point, but when cafes are finding it a struggle they revert to what is easiest.”
Tuatua has its own “mug library”‒ customers can borrow a mug and return it to a drop-off box ‒ and is headquarters of the Mug.Cycle initiative which helps other cafes, businesses and events reduce single use waste by providing them with “rescued” mugs and resources.
A difficult balance
West Two on Taranaki St is known for its “best in Wellington” matcha. Balancing the convenience of takeaways for her customers with the desire to be sustainable is something owner Abbie Dorrington has had to navigate since opening two years ago.
Sit-ins are served in glass and many of her regulars bring their own containers ‒ one morning someone came in with a pickle jar. On the other hand the realities of “on-the-go” lifestyles mean carrying a cup is not always practical.
“We do our best, but often it’s pure convenience.You’re walking past, you see someone sitting having a drink, you decide to grab one. It can be very spontaneous. We also get quite a lot of tourists who are travelling. They’re not always going to remember to pack a cup.”
While she has had customers reuse the plastic cups there were issues around handling cups that weren’t washed properly. “From a germ perspective, for us, you don’t want to have a ‘keep’ cup that’s been used which we then have to wash. Having a dirty cup that’s been sitting in someone’s car for six months and going mouldy is not good.”
But back to that social contagion. Blumhardt and Edmonds agree the path forward isn't a better disposable cup, which would still churn through natural resources to create items for biffing into the bin.
Rather, Government needed to step up to the plate.
Says Blumhardt: “There has been a complete shift away under this Government from being quite proactive about this sort of stuff to being almost like waste is just not an issue … I think we have almost got as far as we can with behaviour change campaigns.
“It would be good to know why politicians and decision makers don't care, why there have been no moves to ban disposable cups and no effort for out of the box thinking.”
However, a plan to ban all PVC and polystyrene food and drink packaging by mid last year was put on the backburner in 2024.
Ironically, says Blumhardt, the recent backsliding overlapped with an increase in the availability and visibility of reuse systems, such as the council-backed Fillgood, a not-for-profit service-ware system where event reusables were collected and professionally washed at a purpose-built facility based at Hnry Stadium.
Still, there was nothing stopping people from using their own cups “except potentially an awkward conversation”.
“If something is slightly unusual, and taking your own container is, there is pretty solid evidence that when people see other people doing it that it creates a normalisation effect. It gives other people who are more awkward social permission to do it too. There is that social contagion again.”
Councils too could be doing more, including introducing sinking lids on new food licences for places such as “hole-in-the-walls” which didn’t have commercial washing machines or were “disposable only”, and ensuring council-run facilities were single-use free.
Cafes could encourage BYO with a simple “we welcome” them sign in the window.
“What we’ve achieved so far in terms of levels of reuse is down to community and non-profit organisations, but it's just not sustainable,” Blumhardt said. “If you take your foot off the accelerator for a second, you go back 10 years.
“You have to maintain that high level of intensity because with everything else going on in the world right now, if you start talking about disposable you’ll see people's eyes glaze over.”
New Zealand is one of 70 countries that make up the High Ambition Coalition which is in treaty talks to end plastic pollution, something it says “constitutes a planetary crisis with impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, the climate and human health”.
Check it out
Sustainable Coastlines has been co-ordinating and collecting data from beach litter surveys since 2018. It uses a localised adaptation of the United Nations Environment Programme/Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission guidelines to conduct quarterly marine litter surveys.
Data shows that several beach sites in Wellington have some of the highest levels of plastic in the country.
They include Petone Beach at the water ski club, where 98% of litter that was picked up during the last clean-up was plastic, Hinds Point, Pencarrow (97% plastic) and Pukerua Bay pā site (77%).
Regionally Wellington has the highest average concentration of litter in the country, at 558 items per 1,000m2. Auckland was next with 416 items followed by Hawke’s Bay with 317. The least littered regions are Gisborne and the South Island’s West Coast.