Reusable Cup

The By&For project team has finalized the implementation possibilities of the project reusable cup, by working with the Swiss Start-Up ‘Kooky’. The changing team structure was led by Theresa Berz, who has contributed considerable efforts into the project. The first test phase was in the library building of the university and was held from the 20th of April 2022 up until the summer vacation that same year. Currently, the second round of the reusable cup test phase is held throughout the university campus until the end of the fall semester 2022. 

After handing over the main project to the SHSG due to their overall reach, the ChangeHub team is focusing on the introduction of a cup dispenser for the self-service coffee machines.

Students are known for being big coffee drinkers and around 1'000 single-use cups are disposed of on campus every day. The reusable cup project aims to make a key wasteful element of our daily consumption at university more sustainable.  

Kooky’s system was the most attractive alternative to Migros, who simply do not have the capacity to wash generic reusable cups themselves, nor give out depot money to students directly. Moreover, using an app to scan the cup and receive one’s deposit should not be a problem to today’s students. Another reason for going with Kooky was the convenience factor for users. One does not need to bring their own cup to the university to be able to have a takeaway coffee without waste, as Kooky offers the possibility of directly disposing the cups in their return machines, facilitating the enjoyment of a waste-free takeaway coffee. 

In the end, ChangeHub is an organisation hoping to make key practices on our campus more sustainable and with that aiding the university in their sustainability goals. 

More information and articles on Kooky were written by the University journal itself, as well as by the student journal Prisma

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