QUPPA WANTS DISPOSABLE CUPS GONE

ALUMNUS IN FOCUS

Four million coffee cups are thrown away every year in Leuven. If you put them all together, you get a pile 23 km high, that is the distance between Brussels and Leuven. This massive waste has been a thorn in the flesh of the CORE team for some time. By founding Quppa, three CORE alumni want to get to the root of this problem. Co-founder Jeroen Diels tells the story.

On 14 December 2020, Quppa was christened in Leuven. The new company is a spin-off of cvba-so CORE, a cooperative of engineering students from Group T Leuven Campus and associates who work towards an efficient and rational use of energy in a circular economy. As a Master’s student in Electromechanical Engineering Technology and a postgraduate in Innovative Entrepreneurship for Engineers, Jeroen was active at CORE for two years. First, he was involved in energy studies in schools, companies and government institutions. After that, he took care of the startup of fellow student Olivier Hendrickx. Together with two other students, Jeroen put the startup on the map as ‘Quppa’.

Jeroen Diels, Wouter Meynendonckx and Thomas Holemans

©Julie Feyaerts

Smart sharing system

“At CORE, we learned to take a radical approach to things,” says Jeroen. “By radical I mean literally by the root (radix). We have developed a completely new solution to the problem of disposable cups. It is a clever system for sharing reusable coffee cups”.

Jeroen explains. “We are introducing a universal, reusable cup for take-away coffee in the city. It can be borrowed without a deposit at different coffee bars. The first step is to register on the Quppa app. In the coffee shop you scan a QR code to link one or more cups to your account. To be clear: the cup does not become your property. You get it on loan. The app reminds you within three days to return your cup to one of the participating spots.

The Quppa cup is a handy alternative to the disposable cup. You do not have to wash the cups yourself, but can simply ‘drop’ them off dirty at one of the participating partners, who will take care of the washing up. Did you forget to bring your cup? No problem at all! You can borrow several at the same time. Quppa is currently free for coffee drinkers in Leuven. The coffee bars do pay a contribution for using the system, but they can easily recover that amount because they no longer need to buy new disposable cups”.

Partners

Fortunately, the three young entrepreneurs are not alone. They can count on the support of two business partners.

“Our first partner is Flanders Circular,” Jeroen explains. “That is the consortium of government, companies, non-profit organisations and knowledge institutions that acts as an inspirer and matchmaker for the circular economy in Flanders. We received a grant from this consortium to develop the technological part of our project, such as the chips in the cups and the reading devices in the coffee bars.”

The other partner is Borealis, the second largest producer of polyethylene and polypropylene in Europe. “The company is currently betting heavily on reuse systems to drive the transition to a circular economy,” continues Jeroen. “At the end of last year, Borealis launched a pilot project to replace 1.5 million plastic disposable cups with 30,000 reusable lightweight copies for reuse after recycling. The cups are produced in Belgium and are equipped with an RFID chip (Radio Frequency Identification), which enables to follow the entire route of the cup. Such data is very interesting for mapping the consumption behaviour of the customer and the life cycle of the product.

Start

The smart sharing system of Jeroen and co is in use in eight coffee bars in Leuven. 500 customers have already registered and over 600 Quppa cups are in circulation. Not a bad result in corona times when most students are at home. It is encouraging that the City of Leuven has promised its support and cooperation. If now the largest potential customer, KU Leuven, also joins in, Quppa will be in a good position.

www.quppa.be

Yves Persoons