Coffee (cup) Tawk

The news is this: Dunkin Donuts is eliminating their styrofoam cups by 2020.  Greenpeace and other environmentally-minded organizations are hailing this change as the first step in the right direction...and I agree...it's just the first step, because just like K-Cups, hot beverage cups are filling our landfills.  This article in the BBC states that 2.5 billion (with a B) cups are thrown away annually regardless of them being paper or plastic.  Here in the US, I'm sure we throw away a magnitude more (this 2016 article says 60 Billion paper cups...and most can't be recycled).

So, I get it, don't throw away your coffee cups...in fact, don't use disposable cups at all. But, the real solution is to not offer any cups but reusable ones, because, as we know from science, even paper biodegradable cups won't biodegrade in landfills...where most of these surely wind up. It's that whole anaerobic thing.  But it says it's compostable.  Wonderful!  That's great!  That means there's no plastic lining waterproofing your cup.  Do you compost?  No?  Do you think cup gnomes roam the streets at ungodly hours in the morning pulling your compostable cups from the trash so that they can use them to make fertile their fields of four-leaf clover and candy canes?

To that, you (and Greenpeace) are right, this is just the first step...but is it a good one? If all disposable cups are a problem, and they are, then we should be focused on using the most energy efficient disposable cup out there. Right?

The Institute for Lifecycle Energy Analysis in Seattle, Washington did a study, and they found that the energy cost of reusable cups (ceramic, plastic, glass) gets lower the more times you use it. That makes sense, if you only use a cup 5 times, you've wasted a ton of energy on each of those times vs. a cup you use 100 times. For a reusable cup to equal the energy cost of a styrofoam cup you would need to use it 200 times.  Can you do that?  Right. So, definitely the first part of the equation, but until we convince our trash-can society to use a cup more than 200 consecutive times, the environmental cost of the styrofoam cup is far less, i.e. more energy efficient; more environmentally sound. 

But me? I use a stainless coffee cup every day...and I'm headed towards those 200 uses...aggressively. For water, I have my BPA Free Nalgene bottle I've used daily for over 3 years...it's getting scummy, but gosh darn it, how irresponsible would you have to be to know you like water at your job and still insist on taking a paper cup every day?  I choose plastic...except...there's issues with that too. For an encore, wanna talk about BPA?...no?

https://www.cnn.com/.../bpa-free-alternatives.../index.html