For the past 12 months, CPR Café and Marlborough Airport have been quietly working behind the scenes to cut airport terminal waste, already down by about 30 percent from the 30 tonnes sent to landfill last year. But this latest move to reduce waste is in the hands of the customer—literally—offering reusable mugs for coffees consumed on premise.

Each year, about 830 kilograms of single-use coffee cups and lids head to landfill from the airport each year, largely from flights and coffees consumed on premises from the café. Neither the lids nor the cups are recyclable or compostable in Marlborough, despite what the packaging might say. All of them must go into the landfill bin, says Operations Manager Steve Holtum.

“People want to do the right thing, so they throw coffee cups in the recycling, but this is worse. Putting coffee cups and lids in the recycling only ends up contaminating the whole lot,” Mr Holtum says.

Over the past year, CPR Café has been recycling tetrapaks from their alternative milks, working with the airport to divert coffee grounds to native landscaping, separating paper recycling, and more recently, working with the airport to compost food scraps and offer reusable mugs.

When the airport gets busy, the volume of coffee grounds gets bigger out in the new compost station, says Shannon Mears, airport landscapers with J&S Mears Contracting.

“We’ve had to get creative with coffee grounds and our native seedlings out here in the airport carpark, as the grounds can be quite acidic. Sometimes we’ll mix it in with mulch, but at the end of the day it’s all nutrients for the plants and a much better use of them than ending up in landfill,” Mrs Mears says.

Having the right partners with a common goal has helped the airport to achieve waste reduction targets, says Dean Heiford, Marlborough Airport Chief Executive.

“Our initiatives to reduce waste and tread lighter on the environment are evolving and continuously improving,” Mr Heiford says. “The common thread now and into the future will be co-creating solutions with tenants and other airport users because we can’t undertake these initiatives alone.”