An East Sheen coffee shop has launched a plastic free campaign.

Coffee & Cake Co, on Sheen Lane, was founded in 2015 by Stana Basic. The business is focused on serving the local community and meeting their dietary needs. Stana began to realise how important the subject of the use and abuse of plastic was.

"The numbers are simply staggering. We use 2.5 billion disposable coffee cups every year in the UK. It is far too easy to feel apathetic and overwhelmed by the sheer scale of this figure, but when I really and truly asked myself what I could do, the ideas began to flow and the quest to take action grew," she said.

"Discussing this issue with my customers brought to the fore their concerns and experiences. For instance, one of my customers, whilst swimming in the sea on holiday, had found herself battling against a multitude of plastic bags. This story alone made me question whether my business was doing enough."

Following these consultations, the cafe made a public pledge to reduce plastic as much as possible by the end of 2018.

Stana said: "A quest to be plastic free may well have seemed rather incongruous without the support of other local businesses, so we asked like-minded people to join us and be part of a growing movement that projected a message of ‘yes we can’ rather than a collective ‘why bother’.

"We aim to take this local momentum further, as what motivates me is seeing the headline: “World’s first plastic free supermarket". We have to look to the future and remain positive and productive, so the next generation inherits a world where they can live and thrive in. Surely, that’s a goal worth working towards."

The campaign has been endorsed by Zac Goldsmith MP, he said: ""We have treated the world's oceans as a rubbish dump for years and the effects on the natural world have been grotesque. Millions of us have seen Blue Planet and even if we didn't know about the problem before, we do now. We all have a role to play, and I would encourage all the shops in the area to get involved in this wonderful initiative."