The paper coffee cup is one of modern life’s consumer conundrums. It is ubiquitous, yet coveted, pricey yet just about affordable. It confers status in a world where you need to be busy to be important, while telling everyone you had time to wait in line while the beans were ground and the milk was steamed. And now there is one more contradiction to add to the list, because the paper coffee cup, it turns out, is recyclable - yet woefully, overwhelmingly, unrecycled.

A conservative estimate puts the number of paper cups handed out by coffee shops in the UK at 3bn, more than 8m a day. Yet, supposedly, fewer than one in 400 is being recycled.

Did you treat yourself to a coffee this morning? And if so, where did you put the cup? I ask because the path that should take a cup from the recycling box in your home – or the recycling section of a street litter bin – into a waste cart, along to a recycling plant and eventually to some form of reuse, is tortuous and fraught. You may have disposed of your cup correctly – say you checked it all over for the Mobius loop, the little triangular arrows of the recyclable logo – but on countless occasions it will still end up in landfill. (The Mobius loop, incidentally, is not a government symbol and its use is unregulated.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest High-street coffee cups are made from paper laminated with plastic, to be watertight. Photograph: Nick Ansell/PA

“I see this as a house of cards,” says Peter Goodwin, one of the founders of Simply Cups, a company dedicated to the recycling of paper cups. By the middle of last year, his business recycled around 1m cups, and he hopes to raise that number to 6m by the end of the year. Even if he does, it will be a mere bean of our coffee consumption. “While everyone may have been under the impression that these products were being recycled, the reality is they more than likely weren’t,” he says, en route to the James Cropper mill in Kendal, Cumbria, where the Simply Cups cups are turned into new packaging. “And certainly if they were being recycled, it was to a very low grade and not within this country. So they haven’t really helped the UK green economy, as such.

“What you’ve got is a lot of corporate companies reporting recycling rates they are nowhere near achieving. Everyone’s patting themselves on the back, going, ‘We’re doing a great job, we’re doing all this great recycling’, when the reality is very different. They measure what they recycle on the weight of the container that leaves their site. Whether or not that’s recyclable, they are allowed to report what goes there. I would argue that the corporates have been happy not to find that out, because it’s been told it’s doing well.”

Everyone’s patting themselves on the back, going, ‘We’re doing all this great recycling’, when the reality is different

The problems all begin with the cup. It is made from paper laminated with plastic, to be watertight. But the compound creates a complicated recycling proposition. It cannot be viably treated as pure paper. First, the plastic coating needs to be separated from the high-quality paper fibre of the cup itself.

“There’s a real challenge to separate compound materials,” says Jonny Hazell of Green Alliance. This problem is not unique to coffee cups. Capri-Sun, laminated crisp packets, and pizza boxes all present similar challenges (the grease stains are deemed a contaminant). Hazell describes the purgatory of a mixed recycling box as it gets “taken off to a big shed with lots of conveyor belts. As that box of materials goes around the belts, individual materials will be pulled out. An adapted potato filter sorts the paper. There’s a magnet to pull out the metals. Jets of air to pull out the plastic.” A paper cup would not be filtered with ordinary paper.

So is a paper coffee cup recyclable? “That’s a rather large question!” says a spokesperson for the Paper Cup Recovery and Recycling Group (PCRRG) – yes, there is such a thing – an industry-wide organisation. Certainly, the answer differs according to who you ask. Pret A Manger says its cups are recyclable, yet it is at pains to point out that it removed the recyclable logo from them a year ago. It now appears only on the optional sleeves – because the sleeve “is pure paper and therefore just as recyclable as office paper”. The cups, clearly, are another matter.

Richard Kirkman, the technical director at waste specialist Veolia UK and Ireland, says cups are recyclable, even from residents’ recycling bins, “however, we can only take a limited amount”, owing to the difficulty of separating the parts of the compound. (The cups that aren’t recycled are converted into fuel.) Partly in response to this, Veolia has teamed up with Starbucks to trial a technology “that will transform the cups into paper pulp that could even be turned into the coffee cup holders given out in stores”, says Kirkman.

But the more you ask the question, the more the answer varies.

South Oxfordshire district council topped the UK’s recycling league in 2014/15 with a rate of 67.3%, well above the national average. Where does it think someone who enjoys a takeaway coffee should put their paper cup? “Definitely recyclable paper cups can go in the green bin,” says the waste recycling executive who answers the phone. Yet the advice from Recycle Now, the national recycling campaign for England, is that they are not acceptable in household green bins. Biffa, the waste company, says that paper mills “do not like coffee cups as it contaminates good recovered fibre”, so it “has taken the decision not to include coffee cups in its dry mixed recycling collections”.

As a result, somewhere along the cup’s path from the recycling bin to the recycling plant, it gets picked out of the stream of plastic, paper and glass as a contaminant and sent to landfill or exported. Even if it makes it through the recycling plant – say on a low-grade paper belt – and arrives at the mill, it will be singled out there and removed. Goodwin says he realised there was a problem when he kept approaching businesses in the hospitality and food service industry with new packaging ideas, and all anyone wanted to talk about was coffee cups.

Coffee cups are an acute litter problem in cities in particular. Photograph: MyLoupe/UIG via Getty Images

“The cup is an issue,” he says. “If you look at the end disposal point of paper being a paper mill, the question is does a paper mill want a paper cup? The answer is no, because it reduces the yield they get. Why would a mill buy a poly-coated material it gets less of a return on, when there is a massive available supply of non-coated material?”

“It’s not as simple as it should be,” says Helen Bingham from Keep Britain Tidy. “There is a disagreement, or lack of understanding, between the waste industry and the coffee industry. The coffee companies say the cups are completely recyclable, you can put them into paper bins, but the question is how they are going to get into the recycling stream without being a contaminant. The coffee companies and the waste industry need to talk to each other. Because it’s a hell of a lot of cups.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Other products such as grease-stained pizza boxes pose a similar recycling challenge to coffee cups. Photograph: Metta digital / Alamy/Alamy

To complicate matters, people tend to be much better recyclers in the comfort of their own homes than out and about. Bingham says that coffee cups are an acute litter problem in cities in particular, often being dumped with paradoxical care. You see them resting on the arm of a bench at the station, or discreetly standing on the floor. “You pay quite a lot for a coffee, your triple latte mocca chocca,” she says. “It’s a special thing. People place them very carefully, and then walk away from them, so it’s not like chucking them down.”

So why has the problem come to light now? Goodwin believes that export markets for these mixed materials have slowed, creating an imperative to find a domestic solution. But maybe, too, the rapid rise in popularity of takeaway coffee has caught some groups by surprise. Wrap, for instance, has no data on paper cups.

In fact, coffee cups – purported indicators of an enviable lifestyle, yet wasting in landfill – fit all too well with a flatlining in recycling habits in the UK generally. Between 2004 and 2010, the UK experienced massive growth in the quantity of postconsumer product it recycled, rising from 22.6% to 40.2% – the fastest improving country in Europe. But over the following four years, the rate rose by only 3.5%. “We have done all the easy recycing things for packaging materials,” Hazell says. And coffee cups – which may be luxurious, extravagant, indulgent, habitual – are not easy. Maybe, like plastic carriers, they will become just another symbol of careless consumerism. It could be time to treat yourself to a keep cup.

Wash and go: three of the best keep cups

The Joco Cup

Glass, so there’s no danger of your coffee tasting like plastic, and with a handy rubber grip, the JOCO is a king among reusable coffee cups.

Price: £19.99

Byocup

Made of fully recyclable silicone, this cup is bendier than your average, but still tough. And it can withstand 200C heat – though it’s unclear when that might come in handy.

Price: £9.95

Polar Gear travel mug from Robert Dyas

This is a no-frills stainless steel travel mug – it will keep your coffee hot and your soft drinks cool. Well played, Bobby D.

Price: £3.49

Ellie Violet Bramley