It is an uphill battle against plastic pollution and every step counts in the climb. Otto's Coffee House in Sevenoaks, Kent, has been taking a few of its own steps and inspiring its customers to do the same. Earlier this year, Otto's banned single-use plastic cups from the shop (not the first coffee shop to do so), but more recently, have brought in about 15,000 used ones in a PR stunt of sort. 

When the owners - Jack and his team - realized that the neighbourhood plastic problem was only getting exacerbated by disposable coffee cups, including those from their own establishment, they decided to do some research and discovered that the local council wasn't recycling enough (only claiming to). 

So Otto's spent a month scavenging through the bins, processed a huge amount of waste, and collected about 15,000 discarded disposable cups which they dumped on the floor of their coffee shop to make a statement about how "human convenience causes significant inconvenience to the environment".

The idea was to recreate how the cups had found their way into the environment in the first place. Customers who now ordered coffee in disposable cups had to wade through the sea of cups to reach the counter. Customers who bring their own reusable cup are served at the door and spared the 'walk of shame'. 

It has been an economically risky movie, especially in the wake of COVID-19, and there has been a 10% drop in sales. But Otto's isn't backing down. Their stance against single-use plastic cups has attracted the world's attention and gone viral, and they plan to continue the war on waste. 

Disposable plastic cups make up a big chunk in landfills, where they take thousands of years to decompose, contaminating soil and water, and posing risks to natural life. Businesses, both big and small, adopting some degree of eco-friendly efficiency are a small but special line of defense in the work to build back a better world. By the sight of the Kent locals queuing up every day outside the coffee shop, their own cups in hand, it seems that Otto's is doing its part quite well.