[Person picking up reusable to-go cup at Go’ Kaffe café]
[Café interior, Martin Agger, manager of Go’ Kaffe, speaking to customers]
[Agger making coffee in reusable to-go cup]
[Agger giving coffee to customers]
[Go’ Kaffe café exterior]
[Board reading “Choose reusables with us” in Danish]
[Reusable to-go cup on display]
Martin Agger (interview): “When you buy your coffee, you get the possibilities to buy a reusable cup. Then you pay five kroner. And when you have (drank) your coffee, you can leave it in one of the deposit boxes and get your money back.”
[Stacked reusable to-go cups]
[Agger making coffee in reusable to-go cup]
[Customer picking up reusable to-go cup]
Martin Agger (interview): “Hopefully we are removing loads of cups from the nature, and thereby helping the environment.”
[Deposit machine in central Aarhus]
[Nicolaj Bang, councilor, Aarhus Municipality, holding reusable to-go cup]
[Bang demonstrating deposit machine]: “So, this is one of our recycling machines. They are placed all over the city, so it’s convenient. It’s close by where you buy your cup of coffee. And basically, what you do, you drink your coffee, you take your smartphone or your credit card. You do it like this. It checks if the system is working and then you just put the cup in. And just like that, you get five kroner transferred to your bank account.”
[Single-use cups on ground, in bin]
Nicolaj Bang (interview): “Well, it’s about 50% of what we take out of the trash cans is actually take away, the stuff you wrap it in, glasses and all this stuff. And last year, we did a cleaning of the river that runs through the city, and we picked up 100,000 glasses. So, it is an issue. And all this stuff ends out in the nature. We get the microplastic, we get cups all over the place. Saturday morning, the city looks like trash. So, this will be a significant impact on micro plastic, but also the general picture of how the city looks.”
[Reusable to-go cup being returned to deposit machine]
Nicolaj Bang (interview): “Basically, this can be expanded to all kind of takeaway. This can be the pizza box, this can be the box you have your curry in, it can be the beer bottles. It can be pretty much anything that will go into a trash can.”
[Worker making coffee in reusable to-go cup at La Cabra café]
[La Cabra café interior]
[La Cabra café exterior]
[La Cabra sign hanging from café exterior]
Joe Hougaard (interview): “All of us, we want to have some kind of impact on the amount of trash that’s lying around and especially us coffee shops. You know, we’re guilty and walking down the street, I do see some of our cups lying around, I see other coffee to-go cups lying around.”
[Reusable to-go cups on café counter]
[Hougaard holding reusable to-go cup]
Joe Hougaard (interview): “I think the main issue is going to be to change people’s habits about to-go coffees, a to-go product. We’ve done it with plastic bottles and that works superbly. You never see a plastic bottle lying around because people have incentive in taking it and getting whatever amount of money you can get from it. But creating that and creating a new habit for people in terms of to-go cups, I think that’s going to be challenging.”
[Reusable to-go cups being cleaned at TOMRA facility]
[Cleaned reusable to-go cups]
Simon Rossau (interview): “Scaling needs to be achieved both from the scale of economics. We need to scale this up in order to make this a financially viable solution. Because reuse is, as it is now, reuse is more expensive than single use. So, we are kind of simulating a future where we’ve had some legislation that that helps the reuse agenda to actually flourish. By now, what we’re looking at, we need scale in Aarhus, but we also need to look upon beyond Aarhus’ city limits, hopefully there will be national legislation or European legislation helping this.”
[Deposit machine]
[Reusable to-go cup being returned to deposit machine]
[Aarhus street]
Trine Wilkens (interview): “I’m very excited that they got it started and that Aarhus started it out. I think it’s very important that we do circular things, reuse things. So, another one, it’s just good.”
[Reusable to-go cup being returned to deposit machine]
Signe Sojberg Hojlt (interview): “I think that people should get used to that we have to take care and we have to move ourselves to these machines or to the trash bin.”
[Busy Aarhus shopping street]
[Single-use cup on ground]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.