Disposable cups, plates, and cutlery became widespread in our daily lives during the Covid crisis. Like disposable masks and gloves, they are not recyclable and persist in nature for hundreds of years. They break down into tiny plastic particles and enter the human food chain, causing irreparable damage to health and the environment.

Our mission is for everyone, whether they are a director, teacher, parent of a child in a kindergarten or school, or an employee in a state, municipal, or private institution, to say: “I choose the reusable cup” and do it!

The Challenge

Environmental pollution with single-use packaging is one of the biggest problems of our time.

At the beginning of the program in 2016, we knew that in most childcare facilities across the country, children drank water from single-use plastic cups. In 2017, we calculated that if every day in 1,894 kindergartens in Bulgaria, each of the 224,380 children uses an average of 5 single-use cups, then over 1 million cups are used every school day, which equals 240 million cups annually with a total waste mass of over 550 tons. A single-use cup is used for merely 2–3 seconds, after which it turns into a pollutant of water, air, and soil for 300 to 500 years.

In 2025, we conducted a study that confirmed the alarming data. In one-third of the kindergartens in Bulgaria, over 80 million single-use plastic cups are discarded annually. Placed side by side, they form an 8,000 km long plastic “river” – 2,500 km longer than the Nile River.

This plastic waste cannot be recycled!

The cups discarded in just one year are enough to cover half the length of the Equator. This consumer “achievement” costs taxpayers over 6 million BGN every year just for the purchase value of the cups, excluding fees and taxes for waste collection, disposal, and more.

The use of plastic cups for drinking water by children in kindergartens is not practiced in any other European Union country.

The use of single-use plastic cups for drinking water by children in Bulgarian kindergartens is an extreme case of consumer behavior that will become ingrained in children’s minds as the norm for an entire next generation of citizens.

Actions

We want the children in Bulgarian kindergartens to grow up with love and care for the world around them and to develop into conscious and responsible individuals regarding their own future.

We are working towards introducing individual reusable water cups for every child in kindergarten groups by providing directors, teachers, parents, and medical staff with materials for an informed choice, combined with ready-to-use solutions for reusable containers that are simultaneously healthy, educational, economical, and ecological:

  1. A set of reusable cups with an individual picture for every single child in the group.
  2. A set of educational and practical materials for gluing, coloring, and cutting, helping to introduce the cups into the daily routine of children, teachers, and medical staff in kindergarten in an easy and fun way.
  3. A system for convenient, aesthetic, and hygienic storage of water cups.
  4. Individual water glasses
  5. See solutions and ways to introduce individual reusable water cups into practice for every child in kindergartens.

Results

Every child who has joined the “Cup” Mission is a huge joy for us. As of August 2025, nearly 10,000 children from 180 kindergartens in 43 settlements have joined the program, who, thanks to their eco-friendly choice, saved 180 tons of plastic from 72,000,000 single-use cups; 1,700,000 BGN in expenses for single-use tableware; 536 tons of carbon emissions; and 375 tons of raw materials.

Mission “I Choose the Reusable Cup” is self-funded and reinvests its revenue into improvements, presentations, design, and operating expenses.

Benefits

Healthy

  1. The reusable cups we offer as an alternative are made of the highest quality stainless steel (grade 304: 18/10 chrome-nickel). 2 Excellent for food contact, 100% natural, durable, and easy to sanitize, 18/10 stainless steel is the preferred material for professional tableware used for the preparation, storage, and serving of food and beverages.
  2. Bisphenol-A Free: the chemical found in most types of plastics, which disrupts the endocrine system.
  3. Saves 8 tons of carbon emissions every year.
  4. Prevents the release of partially filtered dioxins from the burning of plastic in cement plants and some thermal power plants in the country.
  5. Children will breathe cleaner air and be healthier!

Educational

With every sip of water from the reusable cup, children will save yet another plastic cup from being discarded, thereby making the world a better and cleaner place for themselves and for the generations to come. Tell them about it!

With these small steps and seemingly minor changes in the way they drink water, a fundamental change will take place in children’s habits and perceptions, through which they will grow up as people and more responsible citizens:

  1. They will learn responsibility for their own item (cup)
  2. They will learn to put it back where they took it from;
  3. They will get used to reusing resources,
  4. They will get used to valuing things instead of throwing them away,
  5. They will connect the “Man and Nature” curriculum with practice and understand its deep meaning,

Еconomic

Turn expenses into savings!

When using disposable plastic cups for drinking water in kindergarten, you are subscribing to an annual financial expense of 25–30 BGN/child/year.

With the reusable cups of Mission “I Choose the Reusable Cup”, you:

  1. You save 50% of the total cost of cups in the first year of introducing the cups;
  2. You achieve 100% savings on cup expenses for every subsequent year;
  3. You achieve 100% savings on the costs of continuous sanitization after every use compared to regular non-individualized cups;

Environmentally friendly

The environmental benefits of introducing the reusable water cup in kindergartens are countless.

Assuming you are a director or parent in a medium-sized kindergarten with 160–180 children, and you put into practice the idea “I Choose the Reusable Cup!”, then for a period of 4 years, until the children graduate from kindergarten and start school, you will save 880,000 plastic cups, equivalent to saving 2.7 tons of plastic, equal to over 8 tons of carbon emissions.

…And so for every subsequent generation of children! It’s worth it, isn’t it?

Visual advantages

Instead of being dominated by trash cans overflowing with plastic cups, the water-drinking area is beautifully designed with a key for individual cups, information on the water cycle and substances, and a lovely cabinet or shelf where personal cups can be arranged.

More on this topic:

  1. Is the use of disposable cups mandatory in kindergartens?
  2. Over 80 million plastic cups are thrown away annually by kindergartens in our country.
  3. Mission “Reusable Cup” was featured in the luxury edition of BEYONDPLASTIC.

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Project Coordinator:

Sabina Maksimova

Phone number: 0887 54 50 54

e-mail: sabina@ecovarna.info

Partners:

The initiator of the “I Choose a Reusable Cup” Mission is Sabina Maksimova and Zera.bg.

zera