As a conservation organisation committed to continually improving our sustainability practices, we are excited to share that as of December 2025, Single Use Cups (SUCs) have gone for good from all our Auckland Zoo cafés.

We removed SUCs from our Old Elephant House restaurant at the end of 2024, followed by Te Puna and Wētāpunga cafés in April 2025, and now Mokonui café (The Watering Hole), The Lookout and Korimako kiosk cafés have followed suit. You can join us and help wildlife, our planet, and your fellow humans by bringing your own reusable cup from home (ka pai if you already do!) and enjoy a discount on your hot drink. You can also choose to chill out at one of our seated cafés and use our dine-in cups.

“Making long-life reusable cups our ‘go-to’ saves on the use of precious natural resources and reduces waste going to landfill - reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change,” says Auckland Zoo’s Environmental Initiatives Advisor, Claudine Gibson.

“Depending on the material it’s made from, a reusable cup can last up to 15 years and save on using an estimated 2,500 – 3,000 SUCs, or even more if you drink multiple takeaway coffees a day! Here at the Zoo (where we welcome over 850,000 visitors annually) the total removal of SUCs will prevent more than 170,300 SUCs from going to landfill each year. That’s equivalent to SUCs filling more than 1,000 of the 120L Auckland Council general waste wheelie bins you have at home!”

Our journey to reduce waste is ongoing

Auckland Zoo’s journey to replace single use cups with a sustainable alternative dates back over five years. During this time, we’ve encountered their many challenges - including that for a complexity of multiple reasons ‘commercially compostable’ labelled SUCs are not readily compostable in New Zealand.

In our initial efforts, the Zoo became an early adopter of a reusable loan cup system. In 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we made the call to remove these cups as a precautionary approach to minimise any health risks and took the opportunity to review their performance. We identified several challenges, both for visitors and café staff, and in weighing up all the pros and cons decided not to reintroduce this system while continuing to work on a solution.

“We’re really delighted to finally be re-joining other great communities and organisations across Aotearoa who are actively championing the move to a more sustainable café culture,” says Claudine.

As a Toitū net carbon zero certified organisation, Auckland Zoo already diverts 84% of its total waste away from landfill each year, has multiple recycling and green waste streams, and hand-sorts waste on site to ensure correct processing but is always working to do better.

We recognise that the vitality of wildlife, wild places, natural resources, and people are all intrinsically connected, and are dedicated to achieving best environmental management practices across our Zoo operations and putting our best (and lowest carbon) foot forward.

“As well as eliminating SUCs for hot drinks – a priority given we use these the most, we have already eliminated a significant amount of single use food packaging and continue to work on finding sustainable solutions for the remainder of our cabinet food packaging. In addition, we’re working hard to find an alternative solution to the single use cups we use for cold drinks and look forward to sharing updates on our progress.”

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We serve coffee and other hot drinks in porcelain cups and mugs, and we’re encouraging all visitors to sit down, relax and enjoy their hot drink in our cafés.

Did you know?

  • New Zealanders use over 295 million single use cups every year! That’s the equivalent of filling approximately one million, seven hundred and thirty-two thousand (1,732,000) 120L Auckland Council wheelie bins!
  • Depending on the material it’s made from, a long-life reusable cup can last up to 15 years and save on using an estimated 2,500 – 3,000 SUCs, or even more if having multiple takeaway hot drinks a day.
  • Eliminating Single Use Cups (SUCs) for hot drinks at Auckland Zoo will prevent over 170,300 SUCs going to landfill each year. That’s the equivalent of filling more than 1,000 of the 120L Auckland Council general waste wheelie bins you have at home!

Auckland Zoo has been a Toitū net carbon zero certified organisation since 2016 and diverts 84% of its waste away from landfill each year.

FAQs

All single use cups used for hot drinks were removed from Auckland Zoo in December 2025 to meet our goal of being SUC free by the end of 2025!

We removed SUCs from our Old Elephant House restaurant at the end of 2024, and Te Puna and Wētāpunga cafés in April 2025. 

We serve coffee and other hot drinks in porcelain cups and mugs at Wētāpunga café, Te Puna, The Old Elephant House and Mokonui café, and we’re encouraging all visitors to sit down, relax and enjoy their hot drink in our cafés. The other great option is to bring your own reusable cup, and we’ll give you a discount on your hot drink.

Both general Zoo visitors and Annual Pass Members using reusable cups will receive a 40-cent discount.  If you are a member, you will of course also receive your membership benefit of a 10% discount on all items at our cafés.

Yes, the Zoo has great quality re-usable cups for sale at its Zoo Shop and at all its cafés. These are uniquely designed for Auckland Zoo and not available anywhere else!

Available from our Zoo Shop

Yes, like all other products at our Zoo shop and cafés, Members will receive a 10% discount (when you purchase in person).

It’s complex! The SUCs for hot drinks we had in our Zoo cafés are made from paperboard and lined with PLA (polylactic acid), with PLA lids. They were originally selected as they are labelled ‘commercially compostable’ and were able to go into our green waste stream, and away from landfill. However, as the national uptake of commercially compostable packaging increased significantly over time, the management of commercially compostable packaging also evolved, with a number of commercial composting facilities not accepting these materials. (For example, you can’t put SUCs into your Council kerbside food waste collections – they need to go into general waste). The Zoo’s own position of best practice also continues to evolve, based on the latest information available, which is why we’ve been working hard to eliminate SUCs. Sending commercially compostable SUCs to landfill wasn’t the outcome we wanted, as landfills are not the right environment needed for them to break down. Eliminating them was therefore the most sustainable option.

Currently, the SUCs we use for cold drinks are made of polylactic acid PLA (the same material used for the lining and lids of single use hot drinks cups). Like the hot drink SUCs, we originally selected them as they are labelled ‘commercially compostable’.

However, these cups have the same associated challenges as hot drink cups, and we’ll ultimately remove them from Zoo cafés too! Hot drink cups were first up as we used more of these (170,300 each year) compared to the cold drink cups (146,000 each year). We’re working behind the scenes to consider possible solutions for our cold drink cups.

All packaging used for our cabinet foods is currently considered commercially compostable. However, given the challenges surrounding these materials and the use of single use packaging, we’re systematically working towards replacing packaging with alternative solutions.

  • We’ve already eliminated a lot of food packaging; where possible, single use plates have been swapped for either crockery or melamine reusable plates.
  • We use stainless steel instead of single-use bamboo cutlery and have swapped out single paper sachets of sugar and salt for glass condiment jars.

In our initial efforts the Zoo did become an early adopter of a reusable loan cup system. In 2021, we made the call to remove these cups as a precautionary approach to minimise any health risks during the COVID-19 pandemic and took the opportunity to review their performance. We identified a number of challenges, including:

  • Additional time required for baristas to explain the system to customers and provide deposit refunds, impacting visitor queuing times - especially at peak periods.
  • Wear and tear of their silicone lids in our commercial dishwashers, diminishing their appearance and impacting their appeal to visitors.
  • While these stainless-steel cups were a great sustainable material, being single walled, they required an additional cardboard sleeve which couldn’t be reused.

In weighing up all the pros and cons we decided not to reintroduce this system while continuing to work on a solution.