When we’re not quaffing Prosecco (‘cos you know that’s all PR people drink), we love a cup of tea or coffee at JAM. And a biscuit, or a bit of cake.

But how many of us think about where those paper cups end up when we order a hot drink on the go?

This week has seen the launch of a new campaign by environmental charity Hubbub to recycle more than 20,000 coffee cups into 15,000 plastic flowerpots. Manchester’s Oxford Road is now home too 11 giant coffee cup bins as part of #1MoreShot, which will collect the unwanted cups for recycling. Some of the major coffee retailers have pledged their support to the campaign and the flowerpots will be used by Groundwork in its environmental work in the city.

We hope the project is a great success as no real progress has been made on coffee cup recycling, despite Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s very public calls for change. If this campaign reduces the volume of cups being sent to landfill and is the beginning of a wider movement, Manchester could be the birthplace of a recycling revolution.

Speaking of which, it’s been a busy week for one of our clients, The Furniture Recycling Group. The Blackburn-based company has launched the world’s first automated mattress recycling machine and has been inundated with enquiries from around the world.

The patented machine has been created to streamline the mattress recycling process significantly and reduce the number of mattresses sent to landfill in the UK each year (a staggering 167,000 tonnes worth). Traditionally, the only way of recycling pocket springs was to manually separate each spring from the pocket with a knife, which is time-intensive and commercially unviable.

Designed internally by the company’s own engineers, the machinery is already being used to dismantle and separate the components for pocket springs within mattresses, reducing the process from taking over half a day per full pocket spring to just 2.5 minutes. By deciding to develop a solution to a problem it faced as a business, The Furniture Recycling Group has actually created something which will benefit the environment and potentially help to deliver a real step change in the recycling industry. And we couldn’t be more pleased to help them tell their story.

We were on hand when BBC Radio Lancashire visited the site this week, you can find out more by watching their video report here.