St Pauls ‘Cup Sunday’
By Millie Vette
In March and April 2024, I had the opportunity to spend two full months working with my home church, St Paul's Symonds Street, to reduce the number of disposable cups we use on Sundays.
Our church values hospitality and loves to welcome people with a good coffee. However, due to decisions made many years before I arrived at St Paul's, the church uses disposable paper cups on Sundays as part of our hospitality time. So our wider Creation Care team and I decided that we needed to address this as part of being hospitable to our environment too.
The disposable cups currently in use are a combination of paper and plastic (to keep the cup watertight). This journey of exploring the best solution to reduce our waste began with communicating to our community just how many cups we were using each week. Thus, ‘Cup Sunday’ was born, and I became the ‘Keep Cup girl’.
One Sunday after church, I went through all the bins and pulled out all the used cups from that week. In total, I collected 236 cups and 50 lids across three services. That week, I washed and dried each cup, then strung them together. The following Sunday, at each service, I began by explaining to our community what our disposable cups are made from (paper and a variety of plastics) and why they cannot go into the recycling bins. I then pulled out the string of cups so that everyone could physically see the volume we go through in a week. People were surprised! The string of cups went from our Lady Chapel to our front door, stretching about 30 meters in length. Seeing the sheer number of cups we use, rather than just hearing a statistic, helped people to fully grasp the amount of waste we were generating with just our disposable cups.
I followed this visual demonstration with an invitation and encouragement to change our habits and patterns. I invited everyone to bring along an interesting cup to church with them the following Sunday. The next Sunday, all sorts of tea cups and a range of multi-coloured keep cups showed up!
I would love to say that after that one Sunday we never saw a disposable cup in the building. But the truth is that change is slow. Some people are now bringing their keep cups, but we are still using and offering disposable cups at church. But we have seen a small increase in people consistently bringing their keep cups and for that we can celebrate the small wins! The reality of this story is that we are still on a journey, and the pace of change is teaching me patience. Looking ahead, we have plans to hopefully get a dishwasher installed in the kitchenette and have a cup library alongside it so that we can stop using single-use cups altogether. I will keep you posted!
