Nestlé has made it possible to skip the queues and make coffee-to-go in the comfort of your own kitchen. For £4.30 you can buy a box of four disposable coffee cups, pre-filled with a mix of instant coffee and ground coffee sealed under some tin foil.

It’s an invention surely up there with the equally necessary egg cube (because oval eggs are so 2010) and the banana slicer (because knives just don’t cut it anymore.)

Aimed at “busy, urban commuters who value a coffee in the morning”, the Nescafé Azera coffee cups tap into the UK’s thriving takeaway coffee market, where an estimated 8m paper cups are handed out by coffee shops every day.

The cups also tap into somewhat of a recycling blind spot. Much like those used in many high street coffee chains, Nescafé’s cups are laminated with plastic to make them watertight. Only specialist recycling facilities can separate the plastic coating from the paper fibre and, as a result, fewer than 1 in 400 coffee cups sold in the UK is being recycled.

So is it responsible for Nestlé to have added this disposable coffee cup to its offerings, especially given its public commitment to improving the environmental performance of its packaging? A spokesperson for Nescafé says the lid, foil, box and branded wrapper are all recyclable and it “will continue to work hard to overcome the infrastructure barriers of the recyclability of the entire cup”.

Coffee chains have responded to accusations of misleading consumers about the recyclability of their cups with incentives for using reusables.

Starbucks has doubled the discount it offers customers when they use their own cup to 50p until 30 June. Costa promises to donate 10p to the charity Keep Britain Tidy every time a customer uses a reusable cup until 21 June. And Pret a Manger says while there is no official discount policy for customers who use their own cup, baristas can choose to give coffees on the house if they’re feeling impressed.

Nescafé’s to-go cups, however, go entirely against any effort to shift people over to reusables by inventing another throw-away alternative. Pitched as a DIY solution for commuters who like the convenience of affordable on-the-go coffee, they don’t even make financial sense. You can buy a reusable KeepCup for as little as £7 and 55 cups of Nescafé Azera coffee for £3. That’s £10 for 55 cups of coffee. It would cost £59 for 55 Nescafé Azera to-go cups.

So, where previously you would make a coffee at home to leave the house with in a reusable cup, you can now do so for five times the cost in a cup that has less than a 1% chance of being recycled.