A solution may have been found to deal with single use coffee cups in the capital after the city's landfill stopped taking them.
An urban farming group, armed with a shredder, is trialling turning them into compost - but they say it's only a temporary fix.
Popular café Mojo's coffee cups are among those now being shredded and added to compost piles in Newtown.
Not-for-profit group Kaicycle runs the urban farm and picks up food scraps from local businesses by electric bike.
"We add a lot of [coffee chaff] to our compost, it's just what comes off the outside of the bean in the roasting process," Kaicycle Compost's Kate Walmsley told 1 NEWS.
As well as the food scraps, they collect wood chips and now coffee cups because compost needs carbon to balance out moisture and prevent odour.
Ms Walmsley says they can take the cups, but not the lids - which are going to the Tiny Plastic factory instead.
"These coffee lids here are made of PLA plastic and we're going to recycle them into 3D printer filament," Tiny Plastics founder Darcy Snell told 1 NEWS.
What to do with used cups and lids has been a problem since landfills stopped taking them in July.
"We've been struggling here in Wellington to find solutions," Mojo Coffee general manager Katy Ellis says.
"I think what we say to ourselves is you've got to keep going, one step at a time."
Another company taking on the challenge is Bostock Chicken in Hawke's Bay.
They make their own packaging and run a scheme to have it returned to them for composting.
With a little help from Auckland’s Bayview School, we put the composting times of a coffee cup, bottle and biodegradable bag to the test.
"In this environment [composting] can happen very quickly, but at your home it can take up to a year," co-foumder Ben Bostock says.
"The requirements from the EU and the US is that home compostable packaging must take a year to break down inside the home compost environment, which does not have any minimum temperature requirements
He's calling for regulation like that here so that consumers can be confident products labelled as having "home compostable packing" will actually compost in their home.
And while back in Wellington, Kaicycle's helping to get rid of single-use cups for now, they ultimately want to see an end to single-use items altogether.
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