You've heard the stats: Australians throw away 50,000 takeaway coffee cups every half hour, 2.7 million a day, 1 billion every year.

The numbers have been hard to ignore, ever since the ABC's War on Waste program broadcast them into the living rooms of coffee drinkers this year.

It ignited such a buzz around the topic that reusable coffee cup brand KeepCup experienced a 690 per cent increase in inquiries and a 403 per cent increase in online sales.

Around Sydney, cafes have run out of reusable cups, with consumers told of six-week waits until the next shipment.

Saxon Wright, part-owner of coffee brand Pablo and Rusty's, said while reusable designs are a huge improvement, they are "still just another plastic cup".

Mr Wright is a co-founder of Huskee Cup, a reusable ceramic alternative made from discarded coffee husk: the layer of cells that coat a coffee bean.

"We wanted to create a closed-loop system, so we thought if we could use waste from farming to create a cup we could solve problems both at the cafe and farm level," he said.

As a nutrient-void waste material, coffee husk is produced at the milling stage of coffee production. It is traditionally discarded by farmers and left in mounds to go mouldy. 

Annually 1.35 million tonnes of husk waste is generated globally, while the average coffee drinker contributes about three kilograms of husk waste every year.

The idea for the Huskee Cup was first formed on a farm in China's Yunnan Provence, where farmers currently manage hundreds of tonnes of husk waste.

"We met with engineers and industrial designers and realised it actually gave us some interesting properties, like keeping coffee hot longer," Mr Wright said.

The cup is designed for both an in-house dining product and a takeaway cup with a lid. A Kickstarter campaign for the project has exceeded its initial fundraising target, with the cup expected to hit the market by February next year.

It comes as the City of Sydney announced a $25,000 in funding to support the Responsible Cafes initiative, a collective of "coffee drinkers and cafe owners" working towards reducing the use of single-use disposable coffee cups.

The grant is one of the City of Sydney's latest in environmental knowledge exchange sponsorships and supports the initiative's "BYO coffee cup" campaign.
 
"In our area alone, 100 million takeaway coffee cups end up in landfill every year – and each one takes around 50 years to decompose, thanks to the plastic liner inside the cup," said Lord Mayor Clover Moore.

"There's no dedicated coffee cup recycling facility in Australia yet, so we're getting behind the 'BYO coffee cup' campaign to get to the root of the problem."