I'll put my challenge up front: get a reusable travel cup with a lid, preferably steel. Carry it with you whenever you leave the house. Set yourself an ultimatum: if you don't have your reusable cup, you can't buy a to-go beverage from a coffee shop, gas station, or restaurant. That includes coffee, tea, hot chocolate, soda, or juice. Simple. It's a solid first step on the path of minimum waste.
On to the logic:
A while back, I put up a blog post about the need to curtail the use of disposable containers, such as flimsy plastic water bottles and paper or styrofoam coffee cups. It didn't exactly change the world, but my readership is still, um, growing. The containers that bug me the most are the ubiquitous white paper coffee cups. They are almost as annoying to me as those blue plastic bags with the smiley faces from 10 or so years ago that you'd see stuck on fences and in trees. I am not trying to vilify the coffee shops (or Wal Mart), but I am trying to get through to those folks who continue to accept single-use paper cups rather than bringing their own reusable, refillable mug. It's a simple issue to solve.
I plan to try to convince you that this issue is a problem from a couple different angles, environmental and financial.
Environmentally speaking, there are several steps in the life cycle of any item, and a paper cup is no exception. The cup, lid, and the cardboard "hand saver" sleeve must be manufactured from paper or plastic, and sent to your favorite coffee shop via truck, train, or ship. After you place your order with the barista, the cup--for the briefest part of its life--is put into use. You enjoy a piping hot cup of joe, hopefully taking the time to note all the wonderful textures and flavors in commercially roasted coffee (usually, a burnt flavor), and experience (or not) the slight paper, wax, and plastic undertone. After you empty your cup, it finds its way into the trash. Someone empties the trash into the dumpster, and a big, diesel-burning truck comes and picks up the dumpster and hauls it to a transfer station. The contents of the big truck are dumped in an even bigger trailer and hauled to a large, centralized landfill. Every weekday, all day, these trucks make the rounds around town, so keep that in mind when you throw stuff away. The upside to a paper cup is that it could possibly break down into building blocks for life, but only if it's exposed to soil & microbes. Burying things in a landfill, unfortunately, entombs them in a sterile cocoon that does NOT promote degradation, not that that makes any difference for the plastics in your cup--they will never break down regardless of their exposure to the elements.
What does that mean for you? Well, for each cup of coffee you buy and consume in a disposable cup with a sleeve and lid, you generate 3-4 pieces of eventual trash. Lest you think that "I am only one person and can't possibly have much impact with my one paper cup," please consider this thought experiment. There are roughly 12,000 people in my town. If 10% of them get a cup of coffee in a disposable cup every day, that is 1,200 cups that end up in the dumpster each day. We happen to have at least 4 places in town where you can get a cup of coffee to go, so I don't think my guess is too high. A small (12 ounce capacity) cup weighs about 0.5 ounces.
1200 cups x 0.5 oz/cup x 1 lb/16 oz = 37.5 pounds of cups per day. According to Google, 1200 Cups works out to about 10 cubic feet of volume, but I'm guessing the volume decreases by 75% or so when the cup is crushed, giving 1200 paper cups a volume of say 2.5 cubic feet. For reference, my 100-pound chocolate lab (Rusty the dog) takes up roughly 3 cubic feet. So, my rough calculation for my small town's daily cup-to-landfill total is 37.5 pounds/2.5 cubic feet.
Every day. Multiply that by a work week (5 days; 187.5 lbs/12.5 ft^3). Or a work-month (20 days; 750 lbs/50 ft^3). Take it as far as you want, but my point is it gets to be a lot of trash, just in cups. To truly illustrate it, buy a cup of coffee each day in a paper cup, but instead of throwing the cups away, stack them in a conspicuous place, like on your nightstand or in the passenger seat of your car. See how long it takes for an unsightly pile to accumulate. If you can, extrapolate that to your town, and then your county, and then your state, and start thinking about where we are going to put all those cups when we run out of landfill space.
Maybe you don't care about the environment. I pity you, your progeny, and all living beings, but unfortunately, I won't be able to sway you from that angle. Let's try money, since most folks have a fairly strong grasp of, and attachment to, that medium. At $2.00 or so, a cup of regular ol' coffee at Starbucks seems fairly expensive. I can get it down to $0.57, though, if I use my own cup (most coffee shops offer a discount for a "personal cup" or a "refill"). Let's say for the sake of argument that that discount is $1.
Let's set the cost of the cup at $20 because, for this argument, I'm primarily concerned with the money that leaves my pocket (and I like round numbers). If I save $1 each time I fill 'er up, my reusable cup will pay for itself in about 20 cups of coffee. If I buy a cup of coffee every work day (which I don't!), the cup pays for itself in 20 days or so of refills. But then, I can also fill it up when I leave home with whatever beverage strikes my fancy (and whatever I have the raw materials to make). I can also take it camping. So, the reusable cup has added value besides replacing a paper cup.
I've laid out a logical argument against paper cups from environmental and fiscal points of view. My arguments echo sentiments that have been expressed for 50 years or more, so, why are paper cups so ubiquitous? I saw two at a small staff meeting last week (2 out of 12 people (16%) had paper cups with lids and hand preservers in front of them!). It could be because they are a simple, easy, no commitment solution to the conundrum of consuming a beverage. Have we reached the point where we are too lazy to keep track of our own reusable cups? Or, maybe a disposable cup is a status symbol, a way to say, "I can afford coffee from shop X so I don't have to care about consumerism." If you value that image, then keep and reuse your paper cup. No one will know you didn't just buy it! And at $1, it's pretty darn cheap, though I doubt it'll last much past a week of solid use.
The ultimate solution to this cup problem--from both perspectives--is to not buy that beverage in the first place. You don't have to worry about any of the environmental or financial costs outlined above. Brew your coffee at home. Even at the extreme price of $15/pound for the free trade organic stuff, you can brew coffee far more cheaply yourself (on average, a pound of coffee lasts my wife and I a month, and I guess-timate we drink 90 cups/month (3 cups/day) giving a per cup cost of 16 cents. To take the "less disposable stuff" tack one step further, take and refill your own jar or container instead of getting a new paper or foil bag each time you get coffee (beans or ground). Even if you go through a pound a month, that's still $0.50 per day ($15/30 days), far cheaper than commercially brewed caffeinated tar.
Next up on my list of disposable containers to avoid: plastic bags.
Thanks for reading!
For another (albeit similar) take on this topic, check out http://wunderbudder.blogspot.com/2013/08/saving-world-one-cup-at-time.html.
*Unfortunately, I left this cup on a plane during a recent business trip, so it has disappeared into the depths of Southwest Airlines' lost & found. Dang it!
**I was sort of curious what the mark up on this cup was, so I did a quick search and found this one (and a bunch of other cheap, fascinating stuff for sale) for about $3.50; though it's not identical, it's similar enough to tell me that a brand-name logo is fairly expensive. I'd have to dig much deeper (and perhaps quit my job and become a freelance journalist with multiple trips to China) to get to the emissions and human cost side of things, but I'm guessing the profit sharing where my cup came from doesn't include factory workers in China.
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