You Cup Do It

When we created our Green Company, our main focus was to eliminate the use of plastic cups, more precisely in coffee shops, and replace them with reusable ones. At first we wanted to come in contact with local coffee shops in our countries, talk to them and persuade them to do so. This task proved to be a lot harder than we first expected since big coffee brands were already using their own reusable cups that people could buy and use and other small shops just wouldn’t do so since they can’t make such an investment. When we saw that maybe trying to change their policies wouldn’t get us very far even though we tried, we changed our focus from the producers to the consumers. We created a Facebook and an Instagram page where we gathered a total of 90+ likes/followers and we were posting regularly pictures of people using reusable cups and tried to persuade people to post their pictures too using the hashtag ‘YouCupDoIt’, so that we would repost their pictures! We also made polls with questions to let people know just how much damage the use of plastic is doing to the environment to try and motivate people to recycle and/or use reusable cups instead of plastic ones. The polls especially proved to be really successful since they had the highest engagement rate and people seemed really interested in learning even more stuff about it and found the facts we gathered really interesting! We also tried to collaborate with a few other companies, one through Instagram and one in Austria but we couldn’t pull through due to economic issues, since we couldn’t afford to buy promotional material to make the collaborations work! Even though we couldn’t reach all the goals we’ve set at the start of our company, we still believe we had a small, yet significant impact to consumers across different nations and made people re-think their choices regarding to the use of plastic. As a team we learned a lot too through the research we’ve done and how hard it is for a non-profit organization without a budget to make things work in the real word and how tricky it can be.

Work done during the 1st Youth Exchange in Platres, Cyprus

Work done during the 2nd Youth Exchange in Athens, Greece