Melbourne reusable cup business for events and festivals awarded grant to expand

Melbourne small business bettercup, which makes reusable cups for events, has been awarded a $447,000 grant to grow its operations across Australia.

Transcript

00:00At the footy, a festival, or a street party, one and done plastic is everywhere.

00:08Events do produce a lot of waste, unfortunately.

00:11Across all of our waste streams, we still generate 16 million tonnes of waste in Victoria,

00:16and about 4 million of those tonnes go to landfill.

00:19But while there's plenty of plastic at this Melbourne Food Expo, it's different.

00:24It's not going into landfill.

00:26Here, 30,000 cups have been rented, they're given out at entry,

00:30and people are told to put them in a special bin when they're done.

00:33We should have a look at the bin placement...

00:35It's the business brainchild of two women in Melbourne who met on a dance floor in Europe in 2008.

00:41We were always walking all over single-use waste,

00:43like standing on cups and plates and forks and everything like that,

00:47and we heard of reuse systems overseas and we thought we could definitely bring that to Australia.

00:51Now the duo make what they call better cups,

00:54which can be either bought outright or rented to be collected and cleansed.

00:58We've seen it all when it comes to dirty cups coming back,

01:01chewing gum, lipstick on cups, everything.

01:06The cups are a greener alternative for events where glass or metal is not safe or sanitary.

01:12And while it costs more to make at first, over time it can make economic sense on multiple fronts.

01:18They're really hard to break. The point is we want them to be used up to 500 times.

01:22We bought off them once and we've never bought off them again

01:26because their product's that good that we can continually use it.

01:30So these cups are plastic, there's no way of getting around that,

01:33but they feel better than your usual plastic stuff.

01:36They feel like you want to hold onto them and reuse them, or at least put them in the right bin.

01:41Sustainability Victoria estimates some 250,000 kilograms of plastic

01:46has been diverted from landfill by the business,

01:49and it's given it a $446,000 grant to upscale and cater for larger festivals and stadium events.