Two years ago, on a Saturday morning in Mundaring, we gathered at White's Mill and Grind to launch the Global Cup Libraries project — a collaboration between Our Kinds and the Eastern Metropolitan Regional Council (EMRC), aimed at making reuse the default for takeaway coffee ahead of WA's plastic ban stage 2.
Looking back, what's stayed with me from that day isn't the speeches or the support — though Paige McNeil and the rest of the Shire of Mundaring team were generous to be there. It's the question every visitor kept asking: "Is this something I can actually use?"
That's the question reuse has to answer, every single time. And it's the question that's shaped how we've built the project since.
What we've learned
It's not about the cups. The cups are easy. What's hard is the system around them — training café staff to swap reuse into the morning rush without losing speed, communicating to customers that there's no app and no fee, building a return loop that the community trusts. The "Cup Libraries" name was deliberate. What we're really doing is loaning infrastructure.
The regenerative-economy approach holds up. Our partnership with Good Sammy Enterprises means that as cups age out of circulation, they're repurposed at scale, creating disability employment alongside waste reduction. That second-order benefit — work for people who often get locked out — was something we hoped for at launch. It's now one of the parts of the project I'm proudest of.
Council partnerships move faster than people think. EMRC came to this with intent and got operational without the usual bureaucratic drag. If you're a council reading this and wondering whether a reuse partnership is a five-year project — it doesn't have to be.
What's next
The Cup Libraries model is the template we're now spreading. Other councils are watching what EMRC has done, and we've designed the playbook to be replicable rather than custom every time. The Plastics Plan keeps rolling out across Australia; the question isn't whether reuse infrastructure is coming, but who builds it well enough that it sticks.
Two years ago I would have said we were proving the model. Now I'd say we're proving the replication. Different conversation.
If you're a council or a café operator interested in what the Global Cup Libraries playbook looks like, get in touch.