‘It was a plague’: Killarney becomes first Irish town to ban single-use coffee cups

Killarney has become the first Irish town to dispense with single-use coffee cups. Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy

Killarney used to accept it as a price of being a tourist town: ubiquitous disposable coffee cups spilling from bins, littering roads and blighting the area’s national park.

The County Kerry town went through about 23,000 cups a week – more than a million a year – adding up to 18.5 tonnes of waste.