The UK's largest coffee shop chain has pledged to recycle as many disposable cups as it sells by 2020 in an effort to cut the number sent to landfill.

Costa Coffee, which has stores in Weymouth, Dorchester, Bridport and Lyme Regis, said it will recycle up to 500 million disposable coffee cups a year, including those from other retailers to match the number it hands out, and has urged other chains to do the same.

There is growing pressure to tackle the 2.5 billion disposable coffee cups the UK gets through every year, with almost all of them incinerated, exported or sent to landfill.

However, Costa said it was a "misconception" that the problem with recycling cups was because their plastic lining was difficult to separate from the cardboard, and was instead to do with their collection once customers had thrown them into recycling bins.

Costa said it will pay waste collectors a supplement of £70 per tonne of cups they send to recycling plants, increasing the value of a bale by 150 per cent to £125, making it commercially attractive for them to put in place the infrastructure to collect, sort and transport the cups to specialist facilities.

Costa managing director Dominic Paul said: "By creating a market for cups as a valuable recyclable material, we are confident that we can transform the UK's ineffective and inconsistent 'binfrastructure' to ensure hundreds of millions of cups get recycled every year.

"One hundred million cups will be recycled this year alone following today's announcement, and if the nation's other coffee chains sign up, there is no reason why all takeaway cups could not be recycled by as early as 2020.

"At Costa we want to guarantee our customers that if they throw their cup into a recycling bin it will get recycled, and today's announcement is a major step towards that happening."