Your Baby, Their Health, Our Planet, Their Future

It’s no secret that helping your toddler or baby learn to sip and supporting their oral health and development and fine motor skills are our top priority. It’s our piece of the childhood health jigsaw and what we are here to help you with. So how chuffed are we that, whilst putting ‘best for baby’ at the heart of everything we do, we have also been recognised for our sustainable advancements for making our baby cups biodegradable, with the ‘Sustainable Innovation – Materials’ Award from GreentechSouth, the Innovations Hub that forms part of the Clean Growth UK and University of Portsmouth innovations and development network and the facilitator of the Emphasis3 programme.
 

Recycle

Babycup Sippeco First Cups have always been recyclable. From day one, when we launched ten years ago, recycling was part of our product message. We set up a scheme to do the recycling for our customers if they didn’t have a suitable recycling facility nearby.

Reuse, repurpose

We’ve encouraged gifting on to someone else who could use our mini open cups if they were no longer needed, or repurposing them for other means once a little one is using the same cups that the rest of the family uses. Beyond the early years, Babycup Sippeco First Cups have a great list of uses, such as being used as measuring cups in the kitchen. They are so handy!

Less cost, less clutter, less waste
 
As a small family-run business, borne from wanting a healthy cup option for our own children, being a responsible brand is really important to us. One of the great features of using our mini open cups is that it can cut costs for families as they don’t need to buy lots of different types of cups for different ages and stages as there’s no need for different baby cups, toddler cups, sippy cups, tumblers, freeflow cups, growing up cups and so on. This also means space-saving – no mountains of cups tumbling out of cupboards - and less waste – no hard to use and unnecessary gadgets or gizmos. Our baby cups are designed to be just right.

Wanting to do more 

But however useful a product might be, we were acutely aware that once finished with, whether by mistake or by design, products might end up being thrown away in the refuse. So, for our product, we made it our mission to keep innovating and keep progressing.
 
After much searching, reading, discussing, meeting, investigating and trialling, we made our mini cups not only recyclable but biodegradable too. We are so proud of this update and added our 'Sippeco' name to denote our sippy cup eco credentials, and are so pleased with what it means for end of use options for our baby cups wherever they are in the world.

We’ve a whole page detailing the technology side of things and what our biodegradable tag means. But the long and short of it is that, unlike many cups for babies, our Made in Britain 'Babycup Sippeco First Cups' can biodegrade in landfill conditions in a handful of years so won’t be a blot on the landscape or a blight on our beautiful planet.

We were so honoured to be accepted onto the Grant scheme run by GreentechSouth, in association with the ERDF (European Regional Development Fund), to support our aim to become biodegradable and we couldn't be more thankful to GreentechSouth for their unwavering support, scrutiny and encouragement throughout the process of taking Babycup Sippeco First Cups from being recyclable to now being recyclable and biodegradable. As a recipient of the innovations Grant scheme they ran with the ERDF, we went under the spotlight, setting out our aims and rationale to their panel of industry and development experts.

Matt Pullinger, Programme Manager of EMphasis3 for Greentech South made us feel extra happy with his lovely comments about Babycup (and founder, Sara)! “The programme team and panel review board have all been impressed with Sara's commitment to improving the environmental footprint of the Babycup Sippeco range and the research that has been carried out into making the materials biodegradable has to be commended! This commitment has also been recognised during the Greentech South end-of-programme awards evening where Sara won the Sustainable Innovation Award for Materials”.  
 
Taking an idea from that initial seed of a desire to do something, to make a change, to progress, to grow, and seeing it through to fruition, is all the better when you have superb people encouraging you on and supporting you to reach your goal. Out of all the businesses that went through the ERDF Grant scheme, we are especially delighted to be an award recipient.

Everything we do, we aim to do for the very best reasons.

Your Baby, Their Health, Our Planet, Their Future.

We hope you will join us in saying cheers to that! Sip sip hooray!