Products of Change has recently welcomed Little Coffee Cup into our Membership Network, and at BLE I had the chance to catch up with its founder, Hayley Slack, to hear more about her mission.

Little Coffee Cup is a character invented by Hayley for her children’s book Little Coffee Cup and the Big Surprise, following the tale of a coffee cup from its coffee shop origins, to becoming litter by the side of a road, and being rescued by a litter picker to be taken to the James Cropper paper mill and recycled into the very book you’re reading. A story that Hayley shared last Sunday on BBC Sunday Morning Live.

Hayley’s background working at waste company Biffa, showed her the amount of waste caused by disposable coffee cups, and how they can contaminate the regular recycling stream. With their plastic linings, disposable coffee cups require specialist recycling, such as at James Cropper. This, combined with Hayley’s growing awareness of how fewer and fewer children’s books are now made in the UK, led her to create a book that both communicates and provides a solution for the problem by each being made from 13 recycled coffee cups.

So Hayley wrote the story of the Little Coffee Cup to educate on the recycling potential of coffee cups and provide a use for the waste by creating a children’s book in the UK from UK waste. Using a local animation studio, Plus3K, to illustrate the book, children’s imaginations and the real world are fused together. Hayley wants the Little Coffee Cup to be an educational mascot, to teach people to put things in the right bins and to get children involved in the world of recycling, forging an understanding of where things comes from and the responsibility that entails.

Hayley also appeared on BBC Sunday Morning live yesterday (26 Oct) to share the Little Coffee Cup project and her mission. Watch here (31:47).

We are delighted to welcome Hayley and Little Coffee Cup into the POC Community. See more at littlecoffeecup.com or get in touch with Hayley at hello@littlecoffeecup.com.