Programme: Innovations and Competitiveness

Over 400 million disposable plastic and paper cups worldwide are used daily. Adding to them the plastic stirrers and other cutleries (about 850 million.) are over 1.2 billion pieces of waste. This equates to approximately 3,750 tons of waste generated per day.
Considering that only less than 1% of it is successfully recycled, and the rest ends up in the soil and oceans and stays there for over 400 years, it's clear to all that this is one of the biggest problems facing humanity.
Measures taken by the EU to tackle the problem, such as Directive (EU) 2019/904 banning the use and placing on the market of single-use plastic products such as cups, cutlery, straws, and stirrers, are failing to solve the problem globally, as they cover only about 10% of the world's consumption. Still, at the same time, they rise a new problem - the dangerous growth of the consumption of wood, as a substitute raw material.
The majority of plastic cups and straws will be replaced with paper ones with plastic film, and all cutlery such as forks, spoons, knives, stirrers, chopsticks and others will be replaced with wooden ones.

Cupffee Ltd. was founded with the mission to offer a solution to the pollution problem caused by non-degradable plastic and laminated paper cups for coffee and hot drinks.
The main innovations in the project proposal are:
1) edible, biodegradable disposable cup, non-leaking for 12 hours without the use of any coatings;
2) an edible, biodegradable stirrer.
Additional machines will be prototyped for the production process, which will increase production efficiency and enrich the company's product portfolio with edible stirrers. They will be produced from the waste product of the cups, thus Cupffee will have an environmentally friendly production process without generating waste.