The world drinks 400 billion coffees a year and in New Zealand we're slurping coffee and biffing the cups away at record speed.
We toss away 100 million cups a year and the final resting place of those cups are overcrowded landfills.
A hundred million crushed cups is enough to fill nearly two Olympic swimming pools, or a rugby field 60 cm deep of coffee cup waste, or a cone as high as the Sky Tower.
Laid end to end, the cup waste each year would take the nation from New Zealand to Honolulu.
Sunshine Yates from Waste Not Limited says despite coffee cups being made of paper; they are one of the worst things in a landfill.
She says the plastic coating on the cup means even after a year the cup hasn't broken down.
“Yes they are made out of paper, but paper is one of the worst things in a landfill because it biodegrades with no air supply and that creates a leaching of methane gas,” she says.
“The worst things in landfills are paper, food and green waste.”
Matt Lamason from Wellington boutique coffee shop The People’s Coffee says the company sells 40,000 cups a month nationwide - all of which are ending up in landfills.
The People’s Coffee decided to introduce a reusable option.
Mr Lamason says people we trying to bring in their coffee cups from home but they weren’t fitting under the coffee machine.
“These (the reusable cups) are industry standard so its a well thought through idea that we can back and promote to other owners and say for now these are a good packaging alternative,” he says.
Ms Yates says as consumers we can make a difference by putting pressure on our coffee shops asking for alternatives or taking our favourite cups from home.