*A Good idea!

Aimee Nathan, is an 18 years old and attends North London Collegiate School in London.

She currently involved in a campaign called ‘Battlefront’ which involves 20 young campaigners campaigning for something they feel passionately about.

Her campaign is for people to bring their own coffee mugs with them when they go to a coffee store. Currently, over 400 billion cups of coffee are sold every year world wide. The cups that coffee come in are completely non-recyclable, and although some are made from recyclable materials, they themselves cannot be disposed of in a ‘green’ way.

Her particular campaign is one of 5 within Battlefront to be filmed by channel 4 for a series which will be shown later on this year, probably around November time


Here is a message from her:

Last year I was involved in a young enterprise company called 'Original Sin' and we made environmentally friendly organic cotton bags. The aim of the bags was to stop people taking plastic bags from supermarkets, but rather use ours and make a positive difference to the environment.

I started to think about other environmental issues which add the most to the problem of waste and ruining our planet, which led me to coffee cups. Every year more than 400 billion cups of coffee are sold, meaning that billions of plastic and cardboard cups are being thrown into the environment. I realised that taking your own mug to a cafe or coffee chain is one of the simplest things to do, yet nobody does it. For those who buy one, two or even three coffees a day, they could personally save between 365-1095 cups a year just by taking their own with them when they get a coffee.

I also plan to find out which coffee chains offer lowered costs for those who bring their own mugs with them, and find out why these schemes are not more widely publicised.

Hopefully, towards the end of my campaign I will have changed the views of both the consumer and the coffee chains. People will start taking responsibility for their actions, to take a mug with them when they get a coffee, and start to think more about our environment and the planet we live on.

Aimee Nathan
aimeenathan@hotmail.co.uk