A former workplace of mine mandated that no-one was allowed to use re-usable coffee mugs at all. This was done because of the mass of dirty, moldy cups that seemed to fill every kitchenette in a multi-floor building.
The business was a media organization and it seemed to me like reporters were the worst culprits.
The company provided styrofoam cups which were consumed at a enormous rate, and this was deemed to be a better solution than trying to get journalists to rinse their cups.
My office had a lot of ceramic cups that were taken by employees from the cabinet, used and left wherever in the kitchenette.
There was one dedicated employee whose main job was to gather the cups and put them in the dishwasher and after they are cleaned, put them back in the cabinet. Dishwasher ran constantly and that employee kept kitchenette neat in between of cup handling. I think there were even two dishwashers so one can be loaded while the other is working.
The system was pretty much perfect. If people forgot to bring their cups back to kitchenette they were gathered by the cleaners at the end of the day from employees desks.
I'm part of an environmental group at my workplace, and one of our recent pilots was to get rid of single-use paper cups. It was crazy: despite ample clean ceramic cups being available --and indeed stacked on top of the coffee machine!-- many people defaulted to paper cups, sometimes to the tune of having 5-10 used paper cups on their desk at the end of a day.
Anyway, one of the issues that the pilot uncovered was that no-one was loading or unloading the dishwasher: it transpired that everyone thought it was someone else's job. This led to piles of dirty cups and a shortage of clean cups, despite each kitchen area having a dedicated commercial-grade dishwasher.
The long-term solution is education - so that people understand that we must all take responsibility for the cleaning together, and to train people how to use the dishwashers. The short-term solution is for each kitchen area to have a couple of colleagues who keep an eye on things.
I'm one of them for my floor, and I unexpectedly find it strangely therapeutic to do the dish-washing :)
I'm not paying my engineers $200k a year to load a dishwasher for even a minute. We have cleaners who do it as part of their rotation, anything else and you're running a clown show.
So do you use LOC as the primary metric for productivity? I've definitely had insights into a current project while performing a mindless task like washing dishes, in fact there are certain times where I will seek out a task like that.
To me, the bigger WTF is having to train people to use a dishwasher--hopefully that is something most adults can be expected to know how to do already.
> To me, the bigger WTF is having to train people to use a dishwasher--hopefully that is something most adults can be expected to know how to do already.
You'd think, but in this case it is surprisingly unintuitive. The machine is a small high-throughput commercial grade item (takes just a few minutes per wash) which has little in common with home dishwashers. Further, its touchscreen interface is honestly really confusing. It took me a few goes and several wrong turns before I got it right, and this was with motivation.
Having the dishwasher as a choice is one thing, forcing it? That’s crossing a line. And you know you’ll get that all seeing eye watching who isn’t washing their cups and scheming to make their life hell.
> I'm not paying my engineers $200k a year to load a dishwasher for even a minute. We have cleaners who do it as part of their rotation, anything else and you're running a clown show.
I see your point, but it's means to an end. Our immediate goal, as a group of motivated employees, is to remove the paper cups. This is being done with the grudging acceptance of the team who actually run the building, who would probably be much happier if we stopped trying to change things, making their lives more complicated. Thus, while we can make the change we desire quickly and relatively easily, we must also handle the downsides of the change, to be successful - otherwise, it would be reversed. Long-term, having a dedicated cleaner do this would be optimal... but that's a change that would take far longer to enact.
At my office there are signs around the coffee pot reminding everyone to bring their own reusable cup from home, the paper cups are for guest use. When they rolled this out everyone was given a nice cup (with the company logo of course). You are responsible for washing your own cup - dish soap is at the sink in the break room, or take it home.
Some people still use the provided cups instead of their own, but it helps.
I'm not sure where you are but there are a number of schemes in the UK now for recycling these cups. The main one is, I think, Simply Cups so possibly worth contacting them.
That's what we have at our workplace too; the main thing though (from an employer's point of view) is that ceramic cups will take a bit more employee time, either for dedicated staff to handle dishes and rebalancing cups in the kitchens, or for the consumers who have to make sure they put their cups in the dishwashers.
I don't think the environmental impact is that big if they use paper / cardboard cups instead. Those are properly reusable at least.
Are they communal cups? At my office, everyone has their own cup. Perhaps as a happy side effect, there are automatically zero mugs lying around anywhere, because if you leave your mug somewhere then what are you going to put your coffee in? Additionally since most people have a unique cup, other people will recognize yours and try to return it if you misplaced it.
It is almost as bad as the somewhat inexplicable growth in bottled water in places where tap water is perfectly acceptable. In fact many of the branded bottles of water are not spring water but bottled tap water.
To take things from a different perspective, I find people judging what others ought consider acceptable to be inexplicable.
I find people buying $200 sneakers that offer no significant performance improvement over much cheaper alternatives to be 'inexplicable.' I find people buying $1000 phones when a $200 phone would perform literally 100% of a purchaser's tasks to 100% acceptability, to be 'inexplicable'. I even find people buying new cars 'inexplicable' given their hyper-depreciation - meaning a lightly used car is generally a vastly better value.
Of course I put 'inexplicable' in single quotes because these things are all completely explicable. Personal choice is a right of every person in a free society, and people have different views and values. And my examples understate the relevance of this as this choice is far more significant, and frequently personal, when it comes to what people consume than whatever stuff people buy for image crafting.
This is getting closer to a solution but it assumes that damage is totally reversible given money. If you punch me and break my nose, I can sue you for 'damages' (loss of earnings, medical expenses etc) and in the eyes of civil law everything is OK - but really it would be much better if it hadn't happened in the first place! We recognise that by placing a blanket criminal ban on assault, and in the future I think we're going to have to accept that a lot more for negative-externality actions.
> We recognise that by placing a blanket criminal ban on assault, and in the future I think we're going to have to accept that a lot more for negative-externality actions.
But we don't. Rather, we make the price of engaging in that activity extremely high. What would be closest to what you are advocating would be something like summary execution for all cases of homicide and rape, and no civilized country does that.
As somebody who just bought an almost-assuredly overpriced cellphone (Pixel 3), I can say that in my case it's because -- despite being a professional software developer -- I can't tell which $200 phone would actually serve my purpose.
While I know that laptop and desktop systems have reached the point where pretty much anything will serve -- my laptop is over five years old and works for what I need -- I haven't found that phones have topped out yet. There is a massive array of features, including durability and battery life, where there is at least some potential to get more by paying more, and where I might actually use that.
I could possibly learn more by reading reviews and trying to read in between the lines, but as somebody who tries to upgrade rarely, I was content to pay more and hope that I'm actually getting what I need. And then try not to do it again for several years.
I fully admit to ignorance -- and that's your answer. I don't work with many cell phones; mostly, just mine. So you might well be able to recommend me an acceptable $200 substitute. But I bet somebody here would disagree, and I wouldn't know who to believe.
That's my experience. I can't tell you if it generalizes. (I can say that I waited until I got it for half price, which removes some of the sting.)
Tap water here in the Netherlands is excellent, and I’d much prefer it over bottled water, but that’s only available in places where you’d take your jacket off: home, friends, work, school, hairdresser and the likes. If you’re going somewhere you can bring water or buy water in bottles, but I’ve never seen other ways of getting water.
That's one thing that's changed since my childhood.
As a kid, here in the UK, most schools, public buildings and towns (in the street) had drinking fountains. Most town centres, shopping areas, tourist spots etc had them. Quite often they had a way to fill a bottle too. In the eighties they died out, and you'll rarely to never see one today. Why? They certainly weren't unsafe.
Bottled water producers seem to have managed to put people off our overwhelmingly safe tap water and drinking fountains. Now tap is seen as second rate somehow. Put in a vending machine instead, etc. Drinking fountains in schools and streets are long gone.
So now everyone can buy a Coke or bottled water, complete with single use plastic, and we mistakenly call that progress. The same people seem fine using tap water for tea, ice, juice etc.
I remember mentioning this in a comment thread on Instagram. One response came from someone in the UK who said something along the lines of... “It has been scientifically proven that our water contains high concentrations of cocaine, heroin and other drugs. That’s why I will only drink bottled water.” facepalm
I remember in the 80’s when travelling to Europe, whether you could drink the tap water was always a question to ask at the start of the holiday. 30 years later, we are now questioning our own tap water even though the rest of the EU and America have caught up, with water quality that is on par with anything that could be purchased in a bottle.
this story i keep hearing about tap water beeing just as good as bottle one is really starting to get on my nerves.
people don’t spend their money and carry huge loads of water bottles if they can have the equivalent for « free » at home. If they do it’s because the tap water infrastructure (as a whole, up to the kitchen’s tap) alter the taste and quality of the water badly enough, even in the cases where the original source is of comparable quality.
Then put a $50 filter at the tap and you're good for probably $25,000 of bottled water.
It's marketing that drives the preference. That's why most chronic bottled water drinkers I know surround their life with other bullshit irrelevant products. It's the same mechanics
How do you spend $25'000 on bottled water? Where I'm from it costs 16.5 cents per liter. That includes a 2 cent tax for recycling the PET Bottle.
$25'000 is more than you need in several lifetimes.
But then again, tab water here is excellent and also cool. So I don't see a reason why I should transport bottled water. It is much more convenient and cheaper.
> How do you spend $25'000 on bottled water? Where I'm from it costs 16.5 cents per liter. That includes a 2 cent tax for recycling the PET Bottle.
Many people drinking bottled water aren't drinking the cheapest in the supermarket - the recycling bin outside my flat is regularly filled with 1.5l evian bottles - they're £1 each in the local shop. At one bottle a day, that's ~35 person-years. Not common, but not insane.
However, my office has 17 people on my floor. If everyone here drank one bottle of it a day, we'd hit it in 2 years.
> Many people drinking bottled water aren't drinking the cheapest in the supermarket - the recycling bin outside my flat is regularly filled with 1.5l evian bottles - they're £1 each in the local shop. At one bottle a day, that's ~35 person-years. Not common, but not insane.
Even given expensive name brand water, a $50 filter cartridge only lasts for six months. That's $3150 for the same period. $50 replacing $25,000 is not grounded in reality.
Many under-sink filtration systems last at least 10,000 gallons. They take 5 minutes max to replace.
Are you saying that 5 minute task every few years is more work then manually lugging 10,000 gallons of water through say, 10,000 separate containers, carrying each one, opening them manually each time, tipping and pouring them, then discarding them? (that's the weight of about 25 cars)
Not multi-year, but my mother has a culligan reverse-osmosis system (their tap water tastes horrible). There are three filters, the first two get replaced yearly, the RO membrane filter lasts 3 years. Tastes indistinguishable from filtered bottled water.
The problem is not the 5 minutes, it is to remember doing it. Because if you don't remember it, you might get sick from bacteria growing in the filter.
Ask your favorite personal digital assistant to set a reminder and then swap it out using all the time you save not lugging bottled water home from the store.
Actually, I simply use unfiltered tap water. As for the reminder - I think in reality, it often isn't done. A reminder isn't a guarantee for it being done.
As it stands, I have trouble to descale the washing machine every six months.
I know that the simple table based filters (a can with a filter to filter 1 liter of water) are often not exchanged frequently enough.
Even if it gets recycled, it's not free.
Raw materials need to be collected, processed, and transfered. The bottle-quality plastic has to be created and transfeed to the bottle making factory.
The bottles transfered again potentially, filled with water, wrapped in more plastic, transfered again.... all that before recycling.
I think they at least professionally manage the hygiene in their factories. They pay cleaners to clean stuff and exchange filters on a regular schedule.
> If they do it’s because the tap water infrastructure (as a whole, up to the kitchen’s tap) alter the taste and quality of the water badly enough...
That's not it. People don't drink tap water because they don't believe it's safe.
People who don't drink tap water usually have no trouble drinking it after it's boiled.
And non carbonated bottled water tastes just like tap water and you couldn't tell the two apart if there were from taps and brands you are not familiar with.
I am pretty sure that you could tell the difference between a brand of water that is distilled + minerals added and a brand of water that was not distilled in a blind taste test, especially if you drink mostly water.
I think there are even pretty big differences, say, between the tap water in Santa Clara and the tap water in Milpitas, for example.
I mean, If your argument is that bottled water is wasteful, I'm not disagreeing, but I am saying that if you drink mostly water, even pretty small differences in the mineral content make detectible differences in taste.
"if you drink mostly water, even pretty small differences in the mineral content make detectible differences in taste"
absolutely. in the european cities where i lived, you could sometimes tell to which aquifer a household is connected. Depending on the neighborhood some need to clean their bathroom appliances from chalk twice as often.
I recall doing a science project in middle school where I did double-blind taste tests of tap water with a half-dozen brands of bottled water (in a place with decent-tasting tap water, FWIW). IIRC, people showed no statistically significant preference for Evian or other fancy bottled water over the local tap water.
That isn't to say that there's no taste difference, but that preferring a specific brand of bottled water is likely to be much more about the subconscious effect of marketing than something a priori more enjoyable about the mineral content of a specific brand.
Santa Clara water is very hard, I definitely notice a day difference as well. I think Milpitas gets it's water from Hetch Hetchy which is apparently very high quality.
really? huh. I have a pretty strong preference for santa clara water, but that might be me confusing it with the Milpitas smell. I mean, there are a lot of good places to eat in Milpitas, but the Milpitas smell just really puts me off.
A few years ago I worked in an office where people had kept refilling filter jugs for years, and I just started using the tap because the filter was too slow and annoying. Took a few weeks and everyone had stopped using the filter - all it took was seeing someone else drink water from the tap, and gradually people would do the same I did and drink from the tap when the jug was empty and realize it tasted perfectly fine. Probably better than the filter, frankly - I don't want to think about how rarely that filter was replaced and the jug washed.
Point being that while some places do have awful tap water, a lot of people just drink bottled or filtered water because they see people drink bottled or filtered water and copy that without even stopping to consider if their tap water is good enough or not.
Pretty much anywhere you go outside of larger cities in Scotland(if you like outdoorsy stuff like I do) has warnings that tap water is supplied directly from the nearest stream/river/lake and is unsafe to drink untreated. I'm perfectly happy to drink tap water nearly anywhere in the UK but any time we go camping in Scotland bottled water is a must because safe tap water is a rarity.
I guess it's possible that such places exist that have a private water supply - but in general tap water in Scotland is perfectly safe and tastes lovely. I've certainly never seen a sign anywhere in Scotland that warns about the tap water not being safe.
I've seen the 'private supply' notices but I've never seen them say that water should be treated first (nor have I ever had problems with not.) It's disappointing if they're starting to do this in a blanket fashion.
Fair enough that not all tap water is created equally. I live in Australia (Sydney) and tap water tastes fine to most (obviously a very subjective thing).
To be honest, the argument for bottled water (I incorrectly thought) was more due to the convenience factor rather the taste. Clearly there are other points to consider.
I've worked at places that had a fridge where people stored their boxed meals, and they had a rule that the fridge is emptied (to the garbage) on the weekend, to avoid accumulating people's forgotten rotting food.
I feel like dirty dishes have been a problem in every place I have worked. Have any companies wised up and installed a dishwasher in each kitchen, and have someone assigned to run them every night? Or even just pay someone to wash the dishes by hand?
Large companies I've worked at with several hundred people have multiple dish washers per floor, cleaners going round kitchens on the floor making sure cups/dishes are in the dishwashers, running regular wash cycles and emptying.
Small offices with a handful of people normally have people put cups in the dishwasher at the end of the day and turn it on when leaving.
I guess maybe it's the medium sized companies that have an issue? To many people for a end of day cycle to work, not enough people to justify multiple dishwashers/full time cleaner to keep things in order.
We've got a dishwasher in each office, and the office manager/reception tidy up. Most people put their own plates away.
However like with litter and graffiti in the streets, if people let even a small amount of cups & plates build up - then everyone seems to think it's time to dump their stuff in the sink too.
One company of 120+ people I was at did have a dishwasher and people were somewhat diligent in filling it up, but that didn't stop dishes from piling up in the sink etc. The receptionist ended up being responsible for running the dishwasher and so on unfortunately.
I think that’s the solution: make it the responsibility of one person, instead of everyone’s. And that “everyone” probably earns a lot per hour, and each person doing their own small part just wastes a lot of start-up/ramp-down time.
For <10 people there's easy personal accountability and no issues should arise. For 20-50 people I've observed good effects from just having one employee who has the responsibility (and time in their daily schedule) to fill, run and empty the dishwashers. That person can either go around the building collecting everything or police everyone else to put their cups where they belong (in practise almost always a mix of the two).
I don't know how bigger companies handle the issue, but the plan for scaling up seems obvious: have one person responsible for the dishwashers of each floor (or whatever division seems reasonable).
I consulted with a ~small law firm that had staff for that. They setup food and beverages for meetings and depositions, kept the kitchen spaces orderly, and so on.
You just need to convince everyone to get their own unique cup, and they’ll take care of it themselves. Just make sure there’s plenty of dish soap and replace the sponge at an appropriate cadence.
Even better is to have the kitchen cabinets accept dishwasher racks. Then clearing out the dishwasher is simple. You need 3 racks (and one dishwasher):
Interestingly I remember seeing signs at Booster Juice company that talked about why they chose to keep using styrofoam cups for environmental reasons. Because the carbon footprint of producing non-styrofoam cups was apparently much higher.
Than single use paper cups yes, the energy required is much higher. Unfortunately they're not comparing against reusable cups.
A reusable glasscup breaks even in terms of energy vs a styrofoam at ~50 re uses. That doesn't price in the lifetime cost of disposing of the styrofoam, and glass is pretty much inert.
This is a very logical result when there's no tax related to the environmental effect.
Doing this should be so expensive that the option wouldn't be considered. Or then they do it anyway and pay huge taxes for it, paying their share of the recycling / cleaning up.
This same thing is unfolding in my office. They are getting rid of paper cups but no one washes their dishes. I don't understand what's wrong with paper cups? They are biodegradable.
Biodegradable materials get reabsorbed by the environment by definition. They're also recycleable. For instance, cardboard breaks down within two months.
And how were they sourced? How were they manufactured? How did they get to the point of consumption? How were they packaged when they arrived? How do they get to the garbage site?
You have to include all the steps of how it got from tree to your hand and your hand back into the Earth. There's still plenty of pollution in that process even if the object itself isn't part of it.
The vehicles to get there and transport them and equipment to cut them used petroleum. The machines to manufacture the units from the tree parts used fossil fuels, there was waste in the production that's nonrenewable.
The whole process, as in the whole entire complete every step of the way process has to be looked at
> And how were they sourced? How were they manufactured? How did they get to the point of consumption?
Like it's better from reusable cups? Basically will likely be ceramic, plastic, and metal from China, hauled across the ocean in some hugely polluting ship. No thanks.
zero is currently unachievable, fine. But something that reduces the footprint by 99% shouldn't be discarded because it's 1% away from perfection.
I have a zojirushi mug that lasts about 2-3 years. I use it daily and keep it in my bag. It's been in 8 countries this year alone. It probably saves about 600 or so cups so even if it is 10 times more energy to build the canister I have it's still 98% less aggregate energy.
A reduction of 2 orders of magnitude is quite substantial.
The gains here from simply using a reusable cup are equivalent to say, getting a car that got 3000 mpg but had some minor inconvenience such as needing 3 minutes to warm up when you turned it on.
The standard paper coffee cups are about 92% paper and 8% PE for the waterproof lining. Come compostable cups have a lining made from a form of PLA and are, in theory, compostable under the right commercial conditions.
The PE lined cups can be recycled, the UK currently has capacity to recycle all the 2.5 billion cups we use annually.
> I don't understand what's wrong with paper cups? They are biodegradable.
Firstly, they require quite a lot of water and energy to produce and bleach, especially compared to a styrofoam cup.
Secondly, they are still wasteful. Using a glass cup costs less after about 20 uses.
Thirdly, biodegradable is being flung around as a solution, but it only is if you actually dispose of the waste correctly. if it goes to landfill, chances are it won't biodegrade in any reasonable timeframe. Also, biodegradable materials degrade usually into CO2, which is what we're trying to prevent from escaping in the first case.
They don't if there's no recycling going on in your area. As the article writes if it goes to landfill, it gets packed tightly together. Without oxygen it doesn't matter what is it made of.
I'd like to implement some sort of RFID system where workers have to check out coffee mugs with their phones and can be held responsible if they don't end up in the dishwasher (or better, be rewarded if they end up in the dishwasher) :-)
At my workplace there are occasions when some people just push their own glasses, cups or bottle waters up touching the nozzle. It is so unsanitary. When we have the disposable cups this kind of issue wouldn’t happen.
Is it really that bad? As in, so bad it justifies the amount of waste the alternatives produce? I'm sure it's not the worst thing you deal with on a daily basis i.e. door handles are pretty gross.
Indeed they are. I am probably weird, but when I walk into our building I have a paper towel in my hand to grab the door handle. In fact there are two door handles, one from the parking lot and one into the building, so I use one side of the paper towel first, then fold it in half with a clean side on the outside and use that for the building door handle.
Similarly at the cafeteria. I use a "clean hand, dirty hand" system there. My right hand gets dirty handling shared serving utensils, while my left hand stays clean handling fresh plates and such. And then before I eat I find a way to inconspicuously wash my dirty hand. Especially when I've gone to the salad bar and gotten icky sticky salad dressing on my dirty hand. Now that is gross.
Weird? For sure. But at the age of 67 my immune system is probably not as good as it was when I was 20-something.
It's been working so far. I seem to be one of the few people in the office who hasn't been out with a bad cold this year.
Yes, those paper towels are pure waste. I toss them in the compost bin, and I'm grateful to have used them.
Edit: if any of the multiple downvoters could mention what they objected to here, I would be genuinely grateful for the feedback so I can do a better job with my comments. Or if it's something I should have figured out on my own, I will do my best to sort it out. :-) Thanks!
You make your immune system weaker by avoid germs. This system need constant update and training on germs and new germs. I don't really think the immune system get weaker by aging.Also, your skin, provided that you didn't cut yourself, will protect you from almost anything.
Their is a lot more things you should worried about like sick people who still go to work. Door handle will never make you sick...
Not necessarily. Cold viruses are transmitted from objects touched by sick people recently by your own hands onto your face.
If he successfully avoids touching common objects and surfaces this is probably the cause that he didn't caught the cold because that's exactly how you get it.
I applaud your diligence. I'm trying to do what you are doing and fail tertibly. I pretty much get cold (in the cold season) each time I'm going to get groceries or eat at Ikea.
Appeal to the building owners / maintainers for unplated, unpolished brass handles. The copper in brass (or other alloys of copper) is antimicrobial. Obviously the effect isn't immediate, clinical trials suggest it is immpresively high.
If this is OK for you, I guess you are also OK with strangers double-dipping shared sauce dishes. It's funny that this turns into a Seinfeld episode "The Implant" :)
"Timmy to George: That's like putting your whole mouth right in the dip! From now on, when you take a chip - just take one dip and end it!"
What's wrong with styrofoam, assuming it is disposed of properly? Does it cause problems when tossed into a landfill? I think styrofoam is actually pretty good, per unit of source material, because it is expanded so much.
Styrofoam essentially lasts forever. The planet has finite landfill space.
Also, not everything ends up in the landfill but ends up polluting our oceans instead. Unlike paper which will eventually decompose in the ocean, styrofoam will just pile up.
Landfills are storage units and will likely turn into vast repositories of useful materials when we have the energy and technology to sort through them. What is wrong with styrofoam piling up?
According to wikipedia, styrofoam doesn't essentially last forever.
Also, what's with the downvotes for asking a question? This place really seems to be going the way of reddit. Too bad... was a nice place to discuss the facts for a while. Apologies for making anyone question dogma.
No, what I'm saying is, what's wrong with storing things in a landfill until it is economically feasible to reprocess them.
At some point, we're going to want to dig up the resources in a landfill. They're much more concentrated than in the natural environment.
The dogma is thinking landfills are one-way collection systems which grow without bound. As long as they're not leaking into the environment, they seem like perfectly reasonable ways of storing things we do not currently have a use for.
Can you produce a less fanatical source? This PDF spuriously links styrofoam to Parkinson's disease. As I've seen vaccinations blamed for autism, I'm going to disregard this source as reliable.
You're right, not a good source. Google does a poor job of bringing up unbiased soruces. A better term to search for is expanded polystyrene foam. Here are some sources:
The EU has decided to ban throwaway polystyrene foam but I don't know if this counts for much as I don't know how much science was taken into account. There will be a comprehensive risk assessment by the EPA: https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-t....
My worry is when packaging EPS breaks down into tiny particles that could be inhaled. This cannot be great.
If you don't think the people who work at these companies care about making better cups, read the following article.[0] There is a big opportunity for making a better disposable cup, but there are many engineering hurdles to jump over.
- The cup has to retail for 17 cents.
- It has to support a lid that is resealable.
- It has to tip over and not spill.
- It has to handle high temperatures.
- It can't alter the taste of the liquid inside.
- It has to be biodegradable.
- It can't catastrophically fail if the liquid is left inside for too long.
It's worth pointing out that the obvious alternative, reusable to-go cups, need to solve an additional set of challenges:
- Must NOT violate sanitization of the work area; cups provided by customers should not pose any health risks to workers or other customers.
- Should be durable enough to survive repeated visits
- Either the reusable cup must conform to a standard size, baristas need a way to measure liquids consistently without in-cup guides, or coffee could be sold by volume...
- Reusable cups should not introduce enough delay to appreciably disrupt the flow of customers
Disposable cups have the great advantage of being standardized by the company and solve a lot of these problems, especially the health problems. This is just off the top of my head, I'm sure I'm missing some other great points. This is a much harder problem than it appears on the surface; the devil's in the details.
How big a deal could the sanitization thing really be? Every coffee shop I've been to, including Starbucks, will fill pretty much any cup you give them. The only rule I'm aware of is that they're not supposed to handle the lids.
Apropos nothing much, my brother owns a coffee shop in suburban Chicago, and their clientele is mostly local; they have a whole collection of old mugs, which they let customers take with them and return later.
A bit of friendly advice: voting on HN is a stochastic process, and by the time I saw this comment, it had already been upvoted many times. This is one of the reasons the guidelines ask not to comment on voting (but not the most important reason).
I have trouble with this too! A sort-of-obvious trick: instead of discussing whether something should be downvoted, say you upvoted it and why. "I upvoted this, because every cafe I've visited fills third party cups too" says the same thing without litigating the vote, and also emphasizes the new information you're adding.
I would be wary of selection bias in the people who already use reusable containers. They might be more diligent in their sanitation than a larger population would be. Anyone in the food service business that is good, cares deeply about health inspections.
I can foresee some problems with the plan. For example, you might get higher turnover because staff members are sick of cleaning dirty cups. It might take longer to serve each customer which would usually leads to less business. People who aren't aware that they need to bring a cup might leave empty handed and never return. It might be easy to do the occasional mug, but at lunch rush with a line of people it may be a different story.
I would be highly interested in seeing the results of an experiment where a shop only used reusable cups. I think it might surface problems that you might not think of. Not to say that it couldn't be solvable.
Back under Advanced Socialism, we had public soda machines with public glasses which you had to wash yourself at the machine. We did not die out of glass-borne communicable diseases. I don't think the hygiene (or cup management) problem is quite as severe as you suspect it is.
Lest you think I'm some sort of madman, I suspect the hygiene problem is quite mild. But speaking as someone who has washed dishes for a living, people can be quite disgusting with their food and that does get to you.
Having an attitude where you say "why don't they just do this" is typically not helpful. People are smart, they probably have already considered your solutions. If someone doesn't do something the way you think it should be done it doesn't make them stupid. Trying to figure out what you are missing when a solution seems obvious is a helpful way to see the world.
I bought mulled red wine (gluewine sp?) in a christmas market in Germany this last winter. They sell you a proper coffee-type-mug to drink it from, for 6 euros (about US$7), which you can return when you're done and they'll refund you.
I kept mine, it's a nice souvenir of Cologne and I drink my coffee from it every morning :)
If you had to pay, say $10 for a proper coffee mug to have your take-away coffee in, but they'd buy back those same coffee mugs for the same price, that would probably solve the problem.
There is a catch though. Those mugs either stay near the stand they were sold from, or are taken as souvenirs. This works just fine.
With buying coffee on the go, people would take their mug along with them to wherever they are going, and you would have to hand it back the next time you visited that particular coffee shop or one of the same franchise. The risk of the mug getting damaged is much higher, and it is not nearly as convenient to carry a dirty mug around as it is to dispose of a used paper cup.
A lot would have to chance for such a system to work. Customer mentalities being one aspect.
I have zero data on this, but I'll lay decent money that 90% of take-out coffee customers go to the same shop regularly.
After all, they're going somewhere, probably somewhere local, with their coffee. If they weren't, they'd stay at the coffee shop to drink their coffee. Or if they're not going somewhere local, then they're on a long journey (not that common).
I used to drink most take-out coffee when I worked just around the corner from the coffee stand, and went there every day, twice a day, for decent coffee.
Depends where exactly you are, I'd wager 50% of them are currently officially "take it as deposit or as buying" because they're often styled for the specific christmas market and vary from year to year. Not sure why people would collect those, but to each their own.
From what I've read the reusables have to be used ~70 times to be more environmentally friendly than the current disposables.
I think the easiest win would be designating between sit down and take out customers. Sit down customers could be given porcelain or some other washable container. However this would increase labor costs for businesses so you don't automatically get a free win.
This stat gets thrown around for a lot of different kinds of reusable products but what no one ever mentions is what does environmentally friendly actually mean.
When I have looked it up its always simply looking at energy usage to produce the product when by far the biggest impact of our throwaway products is that they end up blowing around the streets or they fall in to the ocean. And even if you do put them in the recycling bin they mostly end up shipped to the 3rd world to be burned or thrown in the ocean.
Also even just looking about the energy usage, 70 times is quite low. A proper coffee cup lasts a lot longer than 70 uses. Really they don't ever break unless dropped.
Depends on the ratio of one-time customers to regular customers.
I go to a coffee shop maybe once a year - perhaps I'm running late and didn't have time to make coffee at home, or I'm out with friends and they spontaneously suggest getting coffee.
Needless to say, I've never had a reusable mug with me in such circumstances! So customers with behaviour like mine are going to be getting a new mug every time, or not patronising coffee shops.
If one in every 70 customers is someone like me, switching to a 70-use-to-break-even cup would be a net loss for the environment even if you get 100% reuse among regular coffee shop patrons.
I have a few reusable, resealable glass coffee cups, and I don’t know that I got 70 uses out of them before I dropped one as I was washing it and it shattered. I’ll be buying plastic reusable cups next time, even though they’re not as nice to use, because for someone as clumsy as me, the risk of breaking a glass object that needs to be hand-washed regularly and is intended to be used while moving around is quite high.
> reusables have to be used ~70 times to be more environmentally friendly than the current disposables
Another commenter linked to a research paper [1] that includes this number. It's worth noting a few things:
* This was comparing ceramic mugs versus disposable cups. They assumed that reusable plastic cups would be more favorable (but did not opine on travel mugs, which are the more reasonable substitute among to-go customers).
* The study was done by Starbucks, among other organizations (may have a bias to make disposable paper look not-so-bad).
* Another study apparently showed 1,000 use threshold, but the author of the below-linked paper considered that study to insufficiently account for all of the costs of paper cups (deforestation, etc.).
full text:
* There has been a long-standing debate over the comparative energy-efficiencies of disposable products and reusable dishware. A study that is frequently cited is one conducted by Martin Hocking, a professor at The University of Victoria in British Columbia. Hocking (1994) reports that one would have to use a reusable cup as much as 1,000 times in order to justify the higher energy requirement during production. Yet this study omits the impacts of deforestation, transportation, packaging, and disposal; a more complete picture is needed to truly debate the environmental costs of disposable versus reusable cups. Starbucks teamed up with the Alliance for Environmental Innovation to more accurately compare the two, naming reusable products the more environmentally-friendly option (Alliance for Environmental Innovation, 2000). Their study found that using ceramic mugs in place of disposable cups would reduce resource consumption and pollution to an astounding extent, even including the impacts of manufacturing, use, and dishwashing.*
70 times seems big until you consider that it's just over two months, or 3.5 months if you only consider weekdays. I have a travel mug (Zojirushi, highly recommend!) that I've used for 3 years and it's still in like-new condition, and a Camelbak water bottle that's over 4 years old and still fine.
Using disposable cups just needs to cost more and that needs to be obvious to the consumer. My local Aldi solved it - even though paper bags are only 5¢, everyone brings their own reusable bag.
Plenty of cafés already have coffee mugs and glasses. I’m drinking a cup of coffee from a Homer Laughlin mug warmed atop the espresso machine at a small mom and pop establishment right now. When I’m done with it, it will go into a bus bin a few feet away and washed by the staff here whenever they’re not too busy to do a load of dishes.
If I had brought my own cup, it would have been a 10¢ discount but to be honest, their mugs are better than mine.
> From what I've read the reusables have to be used ~70
> times to be more environmentally friendly than the current
> disposables.
Is this assuming it goes into landfill afterwards? Does it look better if you use something more easily recyclable?
I think metal is a pretty good candidate: you can get it pretty thin, it's durable, keeps the coffee hot, light and easily cleaned. You just need to ensure that customers are not burning fingers or lips on the containers.
> However this would increase labor costs for businesses so
> you don't automatically get a free win.
I think you could probably build relatively low cost cup washing machines, especially as you control the shape of the cup itself.
> Is this assuming it goes into landfill afterwards? Does it look better if you use something more easily recyclable?
Yes, it does, and yes it does. However, getting the waste to the right place is also problematic. According to BBC[0] despite the fact that the cups are technically recyclable, lamost all of them end up in landfill anyway.
I was thinking about that, but I'm not sure cardboard is a very high grade recyclable (materials made from it tend to be low quality). I was trying to think of something that itself could be more easily reused, like wood (although manufacturing would be awful).
"I think the easiest win would be designating between sit down and take out customers. Sit down customers could be given porcelain or some other washable container."
Interesting, what country are you from that doesn't do this? I can't think of a coffee place I've been to that doesn't, in Australia and Europe. Even McDonald's has porcelain cups for sit down customers.
At least in all the Starbucks shops I've visited in the United States so far, the common practice is for all coffee to be served in to-go containers. There's no eating in distinction, and while the shops sell (and accept) reusable cups, that isn't the default. If you eat in, and don't bring your own cup, you're served coffee in a disposable container.
Some coffee shops in Korea now enforce this rule. If you are staying in the coffee shop to drink your coffee, you are given porcelain cups. If you ask for a disposable cup, you are told that you may not drink your coffee in the coffee shop, there may be some legal reason for it.
most places seem to offer ceramic for sit-down customers? I mean, maybe not starbucks; most Starbucks I've been in don't really seem to have much of a sit-down area, so "for here or to go" isn't really a question. But most nicer places have them; it seems to go with having seating.
I personally have a strong preference for ceramic (not enough to carry my own, but when I'm going to be in a place, I ask for a ceramic cup, simply because it is a more pleasurable experience than a to go cup)
Seems like some sort of deposit system might work. First time, customer buys an inexpensive but reusable cup, which they can take with them. On a following visit, customer exchanges this cup for a clean one, which they can also keep or trade in on a subsequent visit. The retailer would have to wash the cups but at least that would solve the sanitation and consistent serving size issues. After too much wear and tear the cups would eventually need to be recycled, but that cost should be relatively predictable and amortizable, especially at scale.
You've just described my company, https://RECUP.de – it's working very well. Cup deposit is €1, and you can return your cup all over Germany at participating coffee shops and bakeries. At the moment we're at 2500 locations and growing steadily. The system is financed by a daily fee paid by the participating stores, €1 per day per location.
Needs to be asynchronous. You pay for the cup when you buy a drink and you can drop it off at any disposal machine and get your money for the cup back. The problem to solve is that no one wants to carry a cup around for longer than necessary. Buy, drink, dispose.
The government could help a lot by creating a standard cup and mandating all companies have to use them.
> The problem to solve is that no one wants to carry a cup around for longer than necessary. Buy, drink, dispose.
This is a cultural problem. Women carry around handbags that are jammed to the brim with junk. Men don't generally carry handbags at all. There is no place to put a cup.
In Japan there are virtually no trashcans and people are culturally taught not to litter, so everybody has to carry their trash home with them. There is even a movement to disallow workers from using trash bins at work! When I worked at the local high school, I was forced to take all my trash home at the end of each day.
In that kind of environment, you naturally start to carry bags to store stuff until you can get home. Now I have a handbag that I carry with me everywhere. Usually it contains my wallet, my cell phone, a cloth shopping bag and any garbage I happen to have. It's pretty normal here, I think. If reusable drink containers were available, I don't think it would be long until all bags had "cup holders" in them.
But first you need to have a "take your trash home" culture. It's taken Japan decades to make that work. It's not impossible, but it takes time.
Yet Japan is possibly the worst in the world when it comes to plastic waste. They often divide every 2 items from the convenience store into separate bags. Hell, it’s the land of individually plastic wrapped bite sized cookies served in an oversized plastic tray inside a bag with box outside of it.
As an even worse real life example, if you buy a slice of cake and tell them you’ll be eating it in 5 minutes, they get out a laminated box for a slice that can be eaten in 2 bites, insert a plastic ice pack, wrap the box in a tight layer of plastic, tape it, then put that inside a plastic bag large and sturdy enough to carry 2 toddlers. Just for a slice of cake I’ll eat almost immediately. Explain to them you don’t need it, and they can’t comprehend that you’d eat 5 minute warmed cake and do it anyways.
America at least has reusable water bottles and fountains for them in many places. I’ve yet to see such a thing in Japan. People would probably not want to use it because they’d fear it’s unsanitary. Except for some EU countries, America is way ahead of the curve here.
Yep. No argument here. It's all cultural :-P The silliest thing is that plastic bags are not offered in most grocery stores now, but if you pull out your cloth bag in a combini it's a revelation :-) I'm well known in my town for being the foreigner who uses his cloth bag in the combini. Honestly, I'm certain people have them, but they are too embarrassed to use them! I keep using mine in hopes that someone else will follow suit, but it hasn't happened yet. Some day everyone will switch and it will be "Well, of course. It's obvious", but until that day, nobody will...
Yes it is a cultural problem and as we all know they are the hardest to overcome. If we want to make headway we need to start somewhere else and work on culture in the background. In Germany the pfand system has been working well for years. In Berlin you leave your bottle on the side walk and someone who needs the money can collect it to return it. It's a small act of charity that people regularly engage in. I believe it's the same in NYC from what I saw when visiting?
Plot twist: the glass is just crushed and dumped, very little actually gets recycled. Everyone uses different glass for their bottles and you can’t easily separate it once it’s mixed (either as whole bottles, shards of broken bottles, or molten glass).
Unlike plastics, recycling glass does seem to be viable. Even mixed glass can be recycled into other products if it isn't good enough for new bottles. This industry site says that glass recycling in Europe is at 74% https://feve.org/recyclingstats2018/
> Some 2.5 billion coffee cups are thrown away annually in the UK, almost none of which are recycled because of their plastic lining.
That is woefully out of date. We now have the capacity to recycle all the disposable cups used in the UK. The collecting and sorting is where the effort needs to be put now.
Trained staff, health inspectors and dishwashers solved all of this.
Some friendliness on the part of the establishment as well as good judgement on the part of the employees are enough to gloss over size differences in cups. Most travel mugs you see are going to largely conform to your typical to go cups, and nobody really bats an eye at filling a 14 oz cup and charging it as a 12 oz instead of a 16 oz, but if you fork over a 48 oz monster sized mug, you’re probably going to be charged for more than the large cup size and should expect it. How much more depends on the establishment, but at my old job I probably would have charged you for two 20 oz cups and not given a crap about the spare 8 oz, and if I had to answer to my boss, then most likely he would say he would have done the same.
It’s more important to cultivate good customer relations than to nitpick about exact cup sizes. You want repeat, regular customers giving you a constant revenue stream and you’re not going to get that by interrogating them on precisely how much coffee fits in their damn travel mug.
> - Must NOT violate sanitization of the work area; cups provided by customers should not pose any health risks to workers or other customers.
Trained staff can tell customers to hold onto the lid, rinse the bloody mug and fill it with some coffee. The establishment trains the employees to understand how to handle 1. The customer 2. Their mug and 3. Keep the area sanitary.
> - Should be durable enough to survive repeated visits
Durable travel mugs exist.
> - Either the reusable cup must conform to a standard size, baristas need a way to measure liquids consistently without in-cup guides, or coffee could be sold by volume...
Answered more thoroughly higher in the thread.
> - Reusable cups should not introduce enough delay to appreciably disrupt the flow of customers
Dishes are a fact of life in food service. A customer is in charge of keeping their own mugs clean but employees can give them a quick rinse. For mugs that belong to the establishment, trained employees know how to 1. Wash dishes and 2. Load them into a dish sanitizer because they are professionals and it is their job. Health inspectors keep the establishment honest.
Their needs to be a penalty. Another 17 cents on my coffee just dont mean anything when I buy a $4,50 coffee at Starbucks.... (I usually dont buy at Starbucks, but the point stands)
A penalty, or a reward for reusing the container. If your coffee became $3 and you buy one or more a day, that's a reasonable saving over a year for the customers. Pin that with something that makes a public statement that you care about the environment and perhaps there's something here.
The problem is that they require heat to activate the composting process, so need special bins that are sent to commercial composting centers, and there are none of those bins around, so they end up in regular garbage bins.
That link isn’t about a manufacturer developing better cups, it is a retailer spending ten years deciding which type of cup to use. The cup they chose, as far as I can tell from that description, is a standard double-walled PE lined paper cup which has been in wide use for many years now.
As a European I really don't get take-out cups, in most Western Europe there are two options: either you have the 3 minutes it takes to sip on a cappuccino or hot tea, or you drink an espresso standing (both in a ceramic cup). If you see someone walking around with a pint of hot beverage, it's a safe bet they are American.
I heard some American friend that it's part of American culture to control climate: drinks must be piping hot in winter and full of ice cubes in summer. Everyone has to look like they are in a hurry and everything has to be BIG. Combine these things and to-go insulated cups become a cultural phenomenon.
Then again it's funny that in Western Europe alcoholic drinks to go are totally a thing and people love drinking beer on a lawn when it's nice outside. Again, cultural differences...
EDIT: I was thinking mostly about Italy, France, Spain, Benelux, but Austria has a pretty solid café culture too.
Where the hell are you from "as a European"? In Germany you can get a take-out almost anywhere they sell coffee. Vending machines are ubiquitous. It's not just for "Americans".
Having a coffee takes more than three minutes, especially if it's still hot. People don't necessarily have that kind of time in the morning. Or maybe they prefer to drink their coffee at a different place than where they purchased it.
I'm in Italy, but I've seen it throughout Southwestern Europe. If you are in Rome or in Paris, to-go coffee is advertised exclusively in English and cannot be found outside of tourist hubs. FWIW vending machines are popular here too, but they use small plastic cups with no lid.
Effectively not being able to sit and sip my coffee with cigarettes in peace for few hours was biggest cultural shock when I was in Bari, and I'm just over the pond.
It's usually that people want to drink during their commute.
I'm also living in Germany and I don't remember being given a plastic cup - they are always made out of paper, except their lids. I think they should just ban the lids. I also saw a lot of discounted price offers for people bringing their own containers in take-away coffee shops
The lids are easily recyclable. The paper cups have a plastic lining. They can be recycled, but not easily. Most recycling centres can't take them.
As an end user it's really hard for me to know what to do: is this single use hard to recycle plastic environmentally worse than ceramic mugs being washed or plastic reusable cups being reused maybe dozens of times if we're lucky.
Personally, I'd go for single use plastic / paper cups and high temperature incineration, but I have no idea if that's the right thing to do.
Interestingly, where I live (Calgary Canada), our recycling program says that lids are not actually recyclable here because they’re too small and light to properly classify. This is more common than people realize.
They have to be larger than 7.5cm in diameter, eg. yogurt lids. So we are told to trash coffee lids, along with metal or plastic bottle caps, which also are too small. Other programs like Recycle BC can handle coffee lids.
Whereas all paper and plastic cups ARE recyclable here (and in BC), and it’s common for shops like Starbucks to have recycling for cups. Presumably they’re classified and shipped to one of the few batch pulpers. Toronto on the other hand says they can’t recycle such cups
You say clearly, but the full lifetime calculation is difficult.
I have no idea how the clay is obtained, transported to the mug factory, how it's turned into mugs, how the mugs are transported to shops and then to cafés and homes. I don't know how to include the detergent used to wash them, or the dishwasher. I guess we need to include the hot water, but how much of the plumbing do we include?
I also don't know any of this for the paper/plastic cups.
True, can't pretend to know either. Reuse, in as many of those areas you mentioned as possible, seems like the key way to optimise.
Using second-hand ceramic or glass is maybe a good thing to think about. No signalling of demand to a manufacturer, maximising return on the initial co2 cost... Perhaps not viable in every situation.
seconded, it's pretty common in the UK to grab a take-out coffee too. When I worked in a bigger city it was sometimes a bit of a treat occasionally to grab one on the way to the office.
When I was living in France the concept of take away coffee was absurd to me, it's not really a thing except at Starbucks, but we don't have many. I was doing very well without it. Since I'm living in UK (Europe or not europe you decide :D), take away beverages are everywhere, and I'm myself guilty of asking for it sometimes.
I remember a friend of mine from Perth trying to explain me why a specific model of car was not selling well enough there because it was designed without a cup holder. It sounded very strange to me, but now I understand.
Paper cups for take-out coffee are pretty big in Germany, I can tell you. I used to use them pretty often and sometimes still do when I don't have my reusable plastic cup with me.
If you wanna be a hippie like me, get one of those coffee thermos. Most cafés will fill those up in place of their cups if you ask them. Some even give a discount.
I'd mostly agree with you but I happen to have a proper European coworker who constantly brings her big coffee to work, so... there's that. Most of the times she gets refills in her own bamboo cup though.
What about returning refillable standard cups ? You return them dirty, starbucks/mac do wash them and everytime you want a coffee you get a clean one. It existed in France for glass bottles in the last century, it's still like that in Belgium for beers (and works very well). I don't see any problem to apply it for coffee. You can even think of little stickers of the brand from where you get your coffee, those stickers will be removed in the washing process. So if the big names can agree on few cup design/material and a washing process/logistic, they will have a very durable cup!
This sort of thing seems to be getting more common and I don't know why. Lots of software websites without a single screenshot. Yet a photo/screenshot can often tell you more than all the text.
I'm guessing it's because they haven't actually got anything yet. They have 2 images on their front page with the number of cups saved, and they're different amounts. They even use stock images of paper cups in one of the photos instead of their own cup.
I use a keep cup. Its similar to a gas station coffee cup but pretty easy to clean and is light weight. It has a nice little lip cover to prevent spillage when I'm carrying it around. Its also helped around the house with dishes. Its my coffee cup and its easy to move around. I always keep it close by.
For France, I'm pretty sure that bottles (coca-cola and beer bottles) are reused in bars, with the same delivery bringing the full bottles taking the empty ones away.
Sounds kind of like Loop[0]. You get metal containers that you send back when you want a refill, and they sanitize them for you. They seem to be planning to stock more than just food, like mouthwash/hair products.
As far as I'm aware, the most the EU has done is look closely at doing it (most recently in 2018). One could argue that Lightning ports are better (particularly when compared to micro usb), and Apple seems to be slowly switching to usb-c. A standard charger would a. prohibit fast charging technologies or b. "pick the winner" with respect to such technologies. It would almost certainly slow or halt the use of newer fast charging technologies, higher bandwidth connections, etc. as they were created.
I understand bottles are different, but I felt a bit of a need to mention what a bad idea the phone charger thing was. "Design by committee" is a pejorative for a reason. Also, knowing governments, they would do something crazy like mandate the standard soda cup to be small (see NYC).
One slightly worse but standard charger is a better situation than loads of incompatible chargers especially when you consider environmental impact. My main concern would be avoiding blocking progress where a new standard is built which is better but we can't move over to it because of regulation.
That's only true of you prioritize minimization of e-waste over personal convenience, which most (including me) do not. The regulation delay is exactly the problem: had politicians standardized micro-usb, we would still be on it rather than usb-c.
In Australia, the laws refer to the Australian Standards (ie. AS3000 for the electrical code). These are updated as necessary with out an act of parliament.
Regulation delay is a feature here, as we don't need a new standard every couple of years.
No one in America needs a new standard either. Literally no piece of gear I own has usb-c, except for one on my laptop which is not the primary charging port and I do not ever use (due to the traditional lineup of ports being available).
I get switching can be a pain, but most people (the people regulation is crafted to cover) do not upgrade on the schedule of many tech enthusiasts. Consumers are also keeping devices progressively longer as time goes by.
I'm still happy with micro-usb, usb-a, hdmi, etc. for now. People do not switch out devices all at once, and it seems that forcing them to do so would create waste.
Lastly, how do they enforce it? Any one can go on amazon.com and buy a non-standard charger and a plug adapter, right? I would imagine those who do want things like quick charge would just buy the stuff.
It seems like we are still in a transition period. Every host device I have like my laptop and phone uses usb c and every accessory like my headphones and bike lights charge on micro usb even though they are new models. I'm guessing the reason for this may be that microusb is cheaper and offers no downsides when only used for charging.
The correct approach there would have been telling the industry to get their shit together and agree on one standard (and then mandate that, not "that or an adapter" like what they let Apple get away with), under the threat that otherwise they'll make a standard for them.
That's… exactly what the EU did, minus the legal mandate or adapter ban steps?
> In June 2009, many of the world's largest mobile phone manufacturers signed an EC-sponsored memorandum of understanding (MoU), agreeing to make most new data-enabled mobile phones marketed in the European Union compatible with a to-be-specified common EPS. All signatories agreed to develop a common specification for the EPS "to allow for full compatibility and safety of chargers and mobile phones."
> […]
> The original Common EPS memorandum of understanding expired at the end of 2012. The Commission reported at the time that all of the fourteen MoU signatories, "have met their obligations under the MoU." Eight of the original MoU signatories signed a 2013 Letter of Intent (LoI) to extend the 2009 MoU another year and, in 2014, five of those companies (Apple, Blackberry, Huawei, Samsung and Sony) again signed a second Letter of Intent, effectively extending the MoU through the end of 2014.
Doing "exactly that" but minus the legal mandate or adapter ban is like making "exactly" a cup of coffee but without the coffee or water. And then throwing the cup out 5 years ago, too.
Without the legal mandate and adapter ban, they might as well have done nothing. To this day, there are two common connectors for Android phones (Micro USB and USB C), a different connector for iPhones (Lightning), and proprietary connectors for most feature phones.
I would argue that the industry do this already. On the part of Apple, lightning was undoubtedly better than micro-usb, and switching immediately to usb-c would arguably create more e-waste. Also, Apple is probably more sustainable than many other companies.
As the owner of several Apple devices with 30-pin connectors, which I replaced with devices with Lightning connectors, which it seems I will have to replace with devices with USB-C connectors in a few years, I would have been happier if Apple never invented either of those proprietary connectors and just went from micro-USB to USB-C like most of its competitors.
One could also build a business making a printer that prints the company labels on the glass but washes off during the cleaning process. Water based paint or something environmentally friendly. So they could still differentiate their products at the store.
Cups seem like they’d be easy enough to clean. Travel coffee cup lids are another story. I have a hard time cleaning mine, and I’m only concerned about cleaning out my own germs.
I would be concerned about what horrible things a person might do to those cups outside the restaurant. Perhaps this is unfounded, but I assume this would require commercial dish washers to be upgraded (which I'm not opposed to).
I was in Seoul last month. The McDonalds there had plastic coffee mugs and there was a bin for the mugs where the trays are returned and trash is disposed. Of course, normal disposable cup was available for to go orders.
The major issue is cost of course. Disposable cups are a cheap solution. As long as they remain cheap and there are not other compelling reasons, few companies are going to be making any changes.
I've heard this time and again here. It's worth reiterating, put the cost of the pollution on the manufacturer, then changes will occur.
The simple and impactful solution is charging for the cup. Here in CA, we have to pay 10 cents per grocery bag . I could buy a few thousand of them over my lifetime and it would not impact me very much but somehow I can't get myself to pay the 10 cents, since it's going to end up in the trash, so I carry my reusable bags to the store all the time.
A solution that would really work would be to band cities from exporting their trash to other cities without regards as to how it gets disposed. People would find a way to recycle. But I know it's wishful thinking.
It does help. The real problem with plastic is that it's ending up all over the environment. It's very easy for plastic to fly/fall into areas where no one can access it or is managing it.
Sending plastic to landfills at least keeps the plastic in one place away from polluting the whole world. It's not an ideal solution but it helps.
Yes, getting rid of plastic is best but containing it to one place even if you have to use plastic bags helps.
In Seoul these days, I've seen many coffee shops not allow you to sit in if you use the disposable cups. If you want to stay there to drink, you have to use a reusable cup.
This is a silly argument. Businesses have to accommodate people with disabilities now. Stocking a few straws is just one more thing. What's wrong with asking for a straw at the store or carrying a few to use if you need them?
There's no reason why the ban can't be put in place there are alternative methods that can be put in place that will meet needs.
20 yrs from now, I can see an greenwashing-ad of artisan/craft macaroni where ecological considerates up-cycle used macaroni-straws exactly this way. They will have counter-cultural names (unless labeling upcycled garbage for what it is becomes counter cultural). There will be media enchantment all the way (until bankruptcy), everybody yearns for a solution to the threat that too much noodles in the ocean pose to fish.
I'm sure there will be a government grant for it that fleeces tax payers to fund the research. Then they'll realize that pasta is so fragile when uncooked that everyone's straws are breaking and it's a useless product...but someone will make millions from it.
Most of that is starch, which you can wash of by briefly putting the noodle in boiling water (a few seconds) and then washing under cold water for a minute or two, then letting it dry.
It could also be prevented by coating it in a wax, like Carnauba wax, which will hold stable at up to 80°C and is chemically friendly to water, so McDonalds and friends would only have to lower the temperature of their coffee a bit.
I once innocently and accidentally strayed into the disabled-straw debate. My Twitter responses were quite the scene for a few days after.
From memory, it's considered yet another imposition on someone who already has enough struggles to deal with. They might forget, etc. I can't remember what the argument is against straws being kept under the counter and only given on request.
It's ironic that you're calling non-disposable items garbage.
Genuine question, because everyone's life is different, is it really that big a deal?
I bring shopping bags with me when I go grocery shopping. They're more comfortable to carry than the disposable plastic ones. Often they just lie in the boot of the car where they don't take up much space. The backpack I bring to work is big enough to fit the handful of things I might buy on the way home.
I have a resuable coffee cup and water bottle on my desk at work, and I much prefer them to the disposable versions. Occasionally I buy a bottle of water or a coffee in a disposable cup, but whatever, I've still massively reduced the waste I produce from these things. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
It still is garbage, only some people demanded more resources to be spent on making the items so they can be claimed reusable.
In order to follow the movement I would need to carry a backpack of some sort, all the time and all places, or be ready to pay up. I would need to use probably more plastic bags than today, just to prevent spills and contamination from the coffee cups and straws. Gone would be freedom to change plans, leave home with no bags to carry, everything would become pre-planned. All of that for what outcome? Efforts of western countries focusing on cups and straws are a charade with no measurable impact; meanwhile some countries in Asia dump their waste into oceans by tons each minute. Our effort and resources would be better spent helping those countries improve faster, not trying to fix our 0.000001 % share. Most bang for the buck it’s called.
I agree re Asia but I don't think it's an either or situation. I also don't like carrying a cup which is why I think there needs to be a german style pfand system for cups. Straws I can live without completely if necessary. Shopping bags the same. Often I just stack the goods up and tuck them under my arm. Regarding the disabled aspect I reckon everyone has to adjust according to their circumstances whoever they are. The whole system shouldn't change to accommodate edge cases that can be accommodated in another acceptable way. I.E. of course you need to install elevators and ramps everywhere because there is no other acceptable solution but straws... I think that requires a bit of flexibility and effort on the part of the disabled to work with the constraints of the system for the sake of improving the planet.
> everyone has to adjust according to their circumstances whoever they are
The level of your arrogance is astonishing. There is this group of people called the old people. Not disabled, just old with degraded fine motorics, weaker grip, shaky hands and a quivering jaw. Give them a metal or bamboo straw and they'll chew their teeth out. Remove plastic straws completely or make them at a hefty fee and you just made their life another bit harder.
> The whole system shouldn't change to accommodate edge cases that can be accommodated in another acceptable way.
I agree with you there. We already have waste collection and recycling programs, so there is no need to change the system by inventing pfand system for cups or banning plastics in some shapes and forms.
Once again, while you were focusing on straws worth of grams of plastic, others dumped tons of plastic into the wild. You are completely missing the point of the bigger picture and no effort on your side will make measurable impact, not to nature anyway.
The problem is paper straws already suck on their own and disintegrate quickly in a regular cup. It's worse when you use a PLA (biodegradable/compostable) plastic cup with a paper straw. This is because PLA is usually much stiffer than PET or PS lids so you end up with the lid pinching off the straw in its death grip.
I asked a disabled person with cerebral palsy about what he thought of paper straws. His answer: "I don't see the point in having a paper straw if the cup is already plastic"
Unsurprisingly, higher quality paper straws have blossomed in the market since the ban was passed in San Francisco. Actually, I find most paper straws in SF to be quite good now.
Is there a market for reusable washable straws (perhaps metal?) for people with disability who require straws for everyday use? I know they already exist in some form. I've bought a rubber one for my toddler.
The answer doesn't need to be that everyone uses plastic straws just to cater for a niche market.
"McDonald's is being called on to stop its roll out of paper straws in the UK and Ireland, amid claims that they "dissolve" in drinks."
"Petition creator Martin Reed started it a week ago, complaining the new paper straws dissolve as you drink them.
"Many social media users agree, with some claiming paper straws are "horrible" while one says it is like "drinking a milkshake through an empty toilet roll tube"."
I mean, it’s one anecdata point, but I like the new UK McDonald’s straws. Sure they taste different, but they last at least a couple of hours, and they are much stiffer - such that it’s easier to insert, stay where you put them and dont have a leaky bend in.
In order to remain impermeable during exposure to liquid, wouldn’t a paper straw have to have some kind of coating? If that coating is plastic, then it would be no solution to the problem for which plastic straws have been criticized: microplastic pollution in the environment. If the coating is wax, the Wikipedia article for wax paper[0] suggests that there are often environmental issues.
Floridan here. All coastal bars/restaurants must have paper straws.
Generally, they're single drink use. You might get a second glass worth if you drink fast.
I don't really notice a wax on them. If they happen to have any.... they might as well not bother.
I'm a born/raised Floridian, so I grew up on all the propaganda about ocean life getting tortured by soda rings, straws and other garbage. One of my transplant friends threw away some some soda rings without snipping them. I lectured/yelled at them for a good 15 minutes and showed them pictures of animals who got caught in the rings.
We give a shit about sea turtles and no one complains about paper straws out of fear of being stabbed to death by Florida man as he protects the sea life.
Forgot to mention: seagulls. I’m guessing other birds too, but seagulls mostly pick trash from landfills and carry it around. Especially the soda rings if it gets caught around their neck.
Floridian here too, Jaxson to be exact. You must be in south Florida or somewhere not near North Florida. There's no ban here on straws at the beaches.
Southern Florida is much more progressive than North Florida (See any election result).
We're basically Southern Georgia.
Still red where I’m at. But we get actual tourists down here :P
In truth, I’m not opposed to the paper straws. They’re only really annoying when you’re at a bar. Alcohol seems to unwrap them faster than soda. I can let them sit in a non alcohol drink for a good 30 min before I notice an issue. Rum & coke... eh... 15? Just means I have to drink faster and drink more :)
The modern ones seem to be very lightly coated if at all. I do think that the reaction that they are impossible to drink from is more than a little silly, though. Maybe if you leave the straw in the drink for many hours it will collapse on you? I haven’t tried that.
> I do think that the reaction that they are impossible to drink from is more than a little silly, though. Maybe if you leave the straw in the drink for many hours it will collapse on you? I haven’t tried that.
I've had some paper straws that were okay. But I've had many that were soggy within 15 or 20 minutes? Particularly straws in milkshakes. But I suspect doesn't help that I'm in Florida – the high humidity means paper straws probably have a higher moisture content than other places, just by virtue of being in this environment. So it takes less absorption from the drink to make them loose structural integrity and start to collapse.
> I do think that the reaction that they are impossible to drink from is more than a little silly, though.
Why is it silly? Untreated cellulose is extremely absorbent. Other paper utensils that will either hold liquid or be exposed to liquid are almost always treated with wax or plastic.
I have used paper once or twice (albeit not in Florida, just some random place), and it didn't take long to get soggy. Drove me nuts. I feel like businesses will love this; forces people to drink quickly.
If someone has a serious medical reason to need a particular kind of straw, it seems like restaurants could carry a few to provide on request (any legal ban could figure out some exception for this case), or the person could carry their own straw around.
Maybe you are familiar with Spoon Theory? Disabled people who are up in arms about straws typically argue that it's yet one more burden on them when they have too many as is.
I'm not well versed on the straws issues. But let's talk about the California bag ban for a minute.
I've lived without a car for over a decade. I also have a compromised immune system. Disposable plastic bags are cleaner than reusable shopping bags.
I almost never buy trash bags. I use my shopping bags as trash bags.
I don't feel guilty about needing and wanting plastic shopping bags for convenience and germ control.
The bag ban presumes you can just stick your stuff in your shopping cart, take it out to the trunk of your car and drive it home. It is a burden for poor people, pedestrians and folks using public transit. There is no limit on rich people paying the extra 10 cents per bag to have all the bags they want.
It's based on an assumption that you have a car and money and will not give up your car. It actively punishes serious environmental activists actually willing to live without a car.
Getting more people to walk would do more good, imo.
As someone who picks up groceries every week on a bike, a canvas bag is the way to go, purely from a practical, selfish standpoint; if you've ever carried home groceries, you know that plastic bags are probably the worst way to do it. They are hard to handle, prone to tears, and generally unreliable. On the other hand, a large canvas backpack or bag won't tear, can be used plenty of times, and generally works much better.
That plastic ban bag is a good thing -- if you want the convenience of a one time use bag, you should pay for it.
> The bag ban presumes you can just stick your stuff in your shopping cart, take it out to the trunk of your car and drive it home.
Well it might be regional difference, but I don't remember seeing anyone just "sticking their stuff in their shopping cart, take it out to the trunk, and driving home." Who likes to have their watermelons roll over their basil? Everybody who drives to the local Trader Joe's either bring their own bags or buy paper bags.
There might be an argument against plastic bag ban, but I don't buy this one.
Also, even if you buy just three dozen eggs (which might be one of the cheapest things you can fit in a shopping bag), the cost of a paper bag (10 cents?) is already something like a few percent of the whole purchase. Sure it might be a burden, but it doesn't seem like an excessive burden, especially since you can reuse a paper bag for months.
I pretty much only make grocery trips on foot. At least for this pedestrian, both reusable canvas bags and disposable paper bags work just fine for bringing groceries home. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who decided to always drive to the market instead of walking because of the plastic bag ban. If I need to lug home more than I can carry in two hands, dragging a wagon works pretty well.
I re-use paper grocery bags as bags for recycling and compost. We get plenty of plastic bags to use for the trash bin from random other sources, but if we ever ran out, they cost a few cents each if you buy a box.
Growing up in Mexico, we carried groceries home (a mile away and over a hill) from the market in baskets or sometimes backpacks, which was quite a bit less convenient than paper bags from a grocery store. I’m not sure why we didn’t use canvas tote bags.
But I'm extremely frustrated with the fact that no one seems to genuinely be interested in understanding anything I say on such topics. Even the best people here often come across as only asking so as to more effectively rebut my points, not to have their mind broadened or their understanding of the issues deepened.
For someone like me, that's basically life threatening. And the burden is always on me to prove something, to be diplomatic and respectful, etc.
I'm aware it's complicated by my story. I'm aware people find my story hard to believe.
But if you will excuse me, I think it's time for me to walk away from this thread.
I'm genuinely interested in understanding what you have to say. It's difficult to understand though, since the only difference in our situations seems to be that you want to use plastic bags and I don't. When people are rebutting your arguments, I don't get the feeling that they don't want to understand what you are saying. Rather, I feel that they don't want to agree with what you are saying.
It is very possible that we are all missing something integral to your overall argument, but since all of your individual points have been rebutted, it seems that this thing has been unspoken.
It occurs to me that perhaps it isn't your argument that is falling on deaf ears. It's your feeling. Often times, when making an argument, it is hard to separate the two. If only I felt like you, then I would understand immediately. It's a thing that is hard, if not impossible, to put into words and so try as you might, it seems like nobody is able to understand. Indeed it seems like nobody wants to understand.
I suppose if I try to use my imagination, I can imagine a scenario where I would feel the way you seem to feel. Of course, this is not likely to be the same feeling that you actually have. I hope you will forgive me in that I am probably unable to achieve that. In trying, though, I hope it will provide you the sense that I'm not against you and that even if I disagree with you, I care about your feelings.
There have been many times when I have worked hard to get a system that works for me. Sometimes it's been just at the edge of my ability to achieve that system. I'm not good at everything in the world, unfortunately. In fact, I'm extremely bad at some things and even if I try as hard as I can, I can't maintain a level that would be normal for another person. You could say I am disabled in that sense... but it's not a disability that you can see. Nor is it a disability that you can write down on an application for aide. Honestly, I'm just bad at it. Other people can't understand why and so rarely, if ever, make any allowances for me.
In that environment, I get my system going that allows me to just barely pass the level that is tolerated in society and I have pushed myself to the absolute limit to achieve that system. But then... society changes and they ask me to change my system. I want to break down in shame and cry out, "I *can't do it!", but I know that nobody will understand because it is a small thing for them. I don't know what to do because it is a burden I feel that I can't bear and yet nobody will help me.
If you are feeling that kind of thing, then perhaps I can understand. All I can do is to pass on my support. Probably you'll be surprised that a lot of people feel this way about certain things, but owing to the aforementioned shame, they are reluctant to talk about it (or often even admit it to themselves).
Even if I got this totally wrong, I hope it will make you feel better that somebody tried to understand.
I'm genuinely interested in understanding what you have to say. It's difficult to understand though, since the only difference in our situations seems to be that you want to use plastic bags and I don't.
I have a diagnosis of atypical cystic fibrosis. I'm going to take a wild guess and assume you do not. Germ control is a really, really big thing in my life.
It is very possible that we are all missing something integral to your overall argument
If you will read my comments more closely, you might realize that I'm usually not making an argument. It's other people who turn it into an argument.
My first comment was merely an observation, not an argument. The fact that most people here are framing it as an argument to be won is precisely the problem.
It is possible to talk to someone with no goal of proving a particular point. It's called conversation. When done right, it can add information to the system that improves decision making.
But that can't happen as long as the entire fucking world sees a different experience and different point of view as a threat to their precious status quo that must be shot down before it has any hope of taking root.
A genuine question - can’t you buy a stack of plastic bags and just bring some of them with you?
When they introduced the ban on plastic bags in my country, it was more a ban on supermarkets selling them alongside your normal purchase, but you still can buy a stack of a few hundred in speciality shops, and just use that.
And if you forget to bring your own you can always buy the pristine reusable ones at a small cost.
At least here thats how a lot of people protested the ban for a few years - just brought they’re own plastic bags.
Maybe they are banned outright? No way to “smuggle in” a stack or something?
One of the issues is that most disabled people are also poor. Their disability simultaneously imposes extra expenses and tends to limit earning capacity.
Most of the replies here are genuinely not interested in understanding the reasons this stuff is a hot button topic in disabled circles. I'm basically being grilled on the assumption that:
A. I'm too stupid to have thought of any obvious solutions being proposed here and this don't have actual legitimate reasons for my preferences.
B. I owe the entire world justification for my preferences.
C. I speak for and represent the entire disabled community on all topics, even ones I'm only passingly familiar with because they don't happen to be big issues for me in specific.
Bags aren't banned where I currently live. They are banned in California. I was living there at the time that they were banned. I was also homeless at the time. People are equally aggressively dismissive of comments I make about the bag ban being a burden on the poorest of the poor.
Poor people, disabled people and women seem to all be equally dismissed. And then folks just can't seem to understand the rage some folks in those populations feel about various things.
Earlier, you made a post where the whole end chunk was about how going without plastic bags assumes the use of a car.
Then someone disagreed, with detailed examples about how it's not dependent on a car.
You interpreted this as condescension and not trying to understand you. What the hell? They were disagreeing with a part of your argument that wasn't about you at all, since you don't have a car.
They weren't dismissing you because of anything you are.
Also, being able to name a way a policy hurts some particular poor or disabled person doesn't mean it's overall bad for that group. For example: Plastic bags can hurt some poor people that can't easily use alternatives. But when bags aren't free then groceries themselves will be slightly cheaper. This will benefit a different subset of poor people.
Sometimes other people want to add nuance, too. Disagreement with part of what you say is not dismissing you.
But plastic bags in bulk are very very cheap. For American living standards it's not even worth a discussion. I'm very sorry you have to live with that horrible disease but the solution is very simple.
It’s sad to hear you had such an awful experience. I think every society that introduced allowances for the disabled has been better of as a whole for it.
I was thinking with my engineering brain for a simple and obvious solution to a simple and obvious problem. So sorry if that came out as a something dismissive.
But yeah looking from so far away it seams California has much bigger problem than plastic bags...
> But that can't happen as long as the entire fucking world sees a different experience and different point of view as a threat to their precious status quo that must be shot down before it has any hope of taking root.
And now I invite you to try to understand my feelings. If you want it not to be "the whole fucking world" to shoot someone down simply because they have a different experience and different point of view, it's really got to start somewhere. You might keep in mind that my initial interaction in the conversation was an offer to try to understand your point of view.
Rare allergies are pretty much destined to be yet one more burden, no matter how hard we wish that wasn't the case. It's just not feasible to make everything out of materials that won't trigger rare allergies.
One group got lucky with allergies when it comes to one item out of millions. That's not a good reason to lock down the composition forever.
We should help them to compensate for the trouble, but the most effective way is to do it directly. It's possible to use less effort to make them come out ahead, while still keeping the overall benefits from the material switch.
I'm not convinced it's based on people having cars, simply because the bag taxes and bans seemed to emerge first in New York, SF and other cities where lots of people don't have cars and shop at corner stores.
Why is paper the first choice? The obvious choice I think is something that doesn't need to go to the garbage immediately but something re-usable such as metal straws or wood straws.
>Our company cafeteria has metal straws for sale for 50 cents, and a thing to wash them out with.
Hygienic issues are the main concern I have with metal straws (e.g. when cafes have them for reuse). I'm assuming the one sold to you came with something like a pipe brush to run through it.
For public locations it's really going to be on the staff to clean this thoroughly as I doubt a dishwasher is going to be enough.
Wood for me would be worse in this regard, more opportunities for things to get stuck on them (or soak into the wood if lacquer fails)
Here's a reusable straw that comes apart for easy cleaning. Once it's apart I don't see why the dishwasher wouldn't be able to clean it as well as any other dish.
I think you and people with similar points are exaggerating, dipping the straws in a pot full of water until it boils and then using straw-cleaning tools such as this one is more than enough https://i.imgur.com/OeRC2Gz.jpg
> I think you and people with similar points are exaggerating
I hardly think I am exaggerating by stating this concern. The development of one-time use cups (like dixie cups) was primarily to address sanitary issues. I can see lipstick on a glass, I can't see funky residue inside a straw.
I've discussed issues with soap use at some cafes that use reusable ceramics (as it can leave a residue and affect the flavor). One owner of a higher end cafe told me that they chose rather to sanitize their cups with a high temperature commercial dishwasher. This violates their local health code but is practically acceptable.
Anyways, I know it's possible to disinfect straws, but if it proves to be more complicated or requires a lesser known process (like boiling them), the odds if it not being done properly or not at all go up.
At some point in history washing dishes WAS a lesser know process, what happened? Well, it stopped being a lesser know process once it became the cultural norm, the same could happen with cleaning straws -or any other sanitation-.
A reusable straw would be difficult to clean, I imagine.
I'd suggest the first place to start is to just question whether a straw is necessary. I think they're mostly a gimmick, apart from their use by some disabled people.
Carrying around a straw will cause you to end up with a sticky mess if you drink anything but water. I guess the option is to carry it to a bathroom and wash it after every use? No thank you.
...I meant as something owned by the cafeteria or restaurant, like metal forks and knifes, not something you carry around with you, just something you leave there after using for the staff to clean up.
This article was entirely worth it just for this bit of (little-known, at least to me!) information buried in a footnote:
Compostables need the free flow of air to break down. Because landfills are sealed to prevent leakage, even a cup designed to break down quickly doesn't get the air circulation it needs to do so.
By using disposable cups, aren't coffee shops extracting value from the environment but not paying for the privilege? Surely the correct answer is to ban disposable cups and let the market decide who survives? My local sit down cafe does very well with reusable ceramic mugs. Why should the likes of Starbucks get special financial assistance from the environment when the cafe doesn't need it?
Better yet, determine the level of damage caused by a disposable cup and charge a tax large enough to repair the damage. If people still decide to use disposable cups then we won't care since we'll have the money.
In my country (oz) there's been a general trend toward byo cups, mainly pushed through via a brand: keep cup [0]. To my knowledge it started several years ago in Melbourne and spread to the other cities. Many coffee shops these days have either keep cups, white labelled keep cups, or other style.
Now that baristas are used to it, it's less of a hassle for them and is pretty much accepted in lots of places. In my area, maybe one in 5 customers bring their own... Many shops also give a discount for byo because their cost of a cup is gone.
I'm curious what percentage of non-biodegradable waste is from cups and straws. I suspect there are much bigger fish to fry. It would be a bit more work and coordination but it seems that a standard set of 30-50 different metal/ceramic containers could serve most packaging purposes at grocery stores. If marketing/branding is an issue, some soy or other non-toxic ink could be used to print labels and decoration on the packaging with each re-use.
Generally in Australia, environmental initiatives are welcomed. We have sorted waste bins, banned plastic bags, banned single use straws, and recently coffee cups have been a source of attention. I don't have any figures, but every person I work with has a reusable coffee cup. Keep Cups [1] are a very popular option. Unfortunately a portion of the population resist any sort of change, which is rather natural I guess. Change is hard and the youth in this country are typically setting a good example.
A documentary called The War On Waste [2] had a very convincing show on Coffee Cups. This has had a decent impact on the population from my perspective.
The mindset change is probably worth while if this thread is anything to go by. I was rather surprised that there are so many negative comments in this thread. There has been an obvious and substantial shift towards being mindful of your impact on the environment in Australia which is very welcoming.
This scene from Mad Men (57sec) [3] shows how previous habits are no longer acceptable behaviour.
What I worry about is that politicians will prefer low-impact high-visibility policies over high-impact low-visibility policies. Which for some reason, sometimes they do.
For example, Californian politicians introduced a ban on restaurants providing tap water without being asked.... while subsidising irrigation water for farmers that uses several orders of magnitude more water.
I don't know why they'd do that - maybe ignorance, receiving bad advice, cynical political posturing, corruption, or something else - but it's frustrating to see the political energy to solve a real problem being wasted on things that won't solve the problem.
Ask HN: Would a disposable metal cup be totally out of the question? Something like a coke can without the ring pull lid?
With a lip around the rim I can't imagine them being any more flimsy than paper cups. The lid and sleeve could be 100% biodegradable since their time of contact with hot liquids is minimal, and the cups themselves could have a 25c/p deposit scheme to dissuade litter/promote collection of discarded cups.
They must be cheap enough to produce en mass for coke/Pepsi et al, and I recently learnt that metal cans are apparently much better for the environment than plastic since they can apparently be recycled nearly an infinite amount of times (easy to mechanically sort too) compared to plastic and paper that can only be recycled a handful of times before degrading too much for reuse.
Just looked on Alibaba and you can get reusable rigid steel cups for less than a dollar a piece in quantities of 1000. Seems like the price for single-use recyclable steel/ALU cups getting gown to the 17-20c (apparently what a paper cup costs) range would not be out of the question?
Paper cups are hot to hold too - I don't think 0.5mm of paper is a particularly great insulator, at least in my experience. A 100% biodegradable and easily removable (not glued) cardboard sleeve would do the trick like it does with a paper cup I reckon.
With reusable cups I have observed a psychological barrier with myself. I was unwilling to use it when it felt "awkward" (i.e. I'm likely the only person asking to use my own cup the whole day).
However lately it became more common (I live in Germany), more shops offer discounts if you bring your own cup, more likely that the person in front of you also has a reusable cup.
Good. They are a plague. However, I admit that occasionally, if I've forgotten my cup or couldn't bring it, I still use them. Rarely, but it happens.
The solution I want to see, for both coffee cups and shopping bags - is reusable shared containers.
I don't want to have to bring my bags to the supermarket. It's not just a matter of laziness or forgetfulness - sure, sometimes I forget. But it's also a matter of ability. Sometimes I want to buy food on the way home from work, but I don't drive there and it's not really practical to bring my reusable bags every time.
Let me pay a deposit to take some reusable bags with me, then let me just bring them all back at once and get a refund.
Coffee cups are a bit harder since they need to be washed, but I'm sure there's a solution.
Shopping bags need to be washed, too. Meat juices, being set down on dirty surfaces (bus stop, muddy driveway), left for a week in a house with pests or vermin, etc. Most people are not going to want to reuse someone else's reusable bag without laundering.
The crux of all of these issues is that we want the benefits of containers without the consequences.
Well, we're learning that you have to deal with it at some point, be it the occasional washing or mountains of trash. People are going to have to just suck it up about reusing things. As long as it's safe, people's feelings about perceived ickiness will go away once the practice is normalized. And eventually we won't even remember how convenient it was to just throw things away.
Flipping it inside out every time would solve most of these problems. The scraps would come out and thinks would get a chance to evaporate.
It's not a luxury product solution, sure. But if I was traveling to a poor country and everyone was doing it, I'd consider it clever and just go along with it.
My favorite coffee shop in LA, barnine.us uses glass canning jars for to-go. You bring back a dozen for a free drink. Totally ridiculously infeasible for non-boutique shops though.
In our office, it's not an issue that people don't wash their cups out, because our building has a cleaning crew and they wash the cups for us. Why is that so difficult?
If you operate a coffee shop and don't want your customers to give you dirty coffee cups, make it easier for your customers to give you clean cups. That means having some kind of customer-facing sink or washing station towards which a sign directs customers to wash their mugs, regardless of whether they are already clean since we all know different people have different standards for cleanliness.
If you have co-workers who ride their bikes to work, we don't hem and haw over how smelly bike riders are going to be on hot summer days and how there's gotta be some alternative to them riding their bikes. Instead, we install on-premises showers. Bike riders are happy to take showers when they arrive. The showers are kept clean by the facility's cleaning crew. Everybody's happy. Why is this so complicated?
To me this thread encapsulates why over engineering is bad. We don't need complex solutions to the problem of re-usable cups. We don't need an external company that will sanitise a returnable mug for you. The solution is right in front of everyone - buy a reusable container/mug/cup, fill it up, clean it when you're done. It isn't hard.
It is hard if you're lazy and irresponsible, like me. I wager the world is filled with people like me, this, I'm counting on "over engineering" to save me.
When I was living in Portland it was super common for people to bring their own mugs (usually those metal camping style cups with closable tops, but I'd see plastic cups too) to coffee shops. The baristas would usually blast them with some steam to clean them out then fill 'em up! Easy as pie.
OTOH it seems like less coffee shops offer mugs for in-house drinking nowadays. Takeaway is harder but there's no reason not to use mugs if you're staying in the store.
In the UK there is a chain called Costa where the in-house mug only comes in one size, and it's a thimble - much smaller than the larger take-away cup. So you end up asking for a take-away cup even though you're staying in and they have mugs available.
I honestly don't see why this is a problem. I use my straw, or my coffee cup, or whatever, and I throw it in a trash can. It's not going to hurt any marine mammals unless you, the city government, go and dump it into the sea.
So don't do that. If you can no longer put your trash on a barge to China, put it on a train instead and bury it somewhere in the enormous deserts that cover one third of the country.
I don't want to hear about how every single square inch of the desert is infinitely precious and irreplaceable, either. When the US needed to test nuclear weapons, they took a chunk of desert they didn't care about and nuked it. Just take another chunk, and put garbage in it! Maybe use the same chunk, it's been 70 years, it's probably fine now. Anyway, leave me alone.
Nothing, whatever, could be wrong with me.
The world must be as it is, logically.
Why try to improve? And if you say we must,
I'll question, flail, pout, and then call it unjust.
Don't tell me it's my fault, for I just got here.
I'll blame it on past people, maybe a peer.
My life is just fine, and if others' are not,
Well, life's just unfair, they deserve what they got!
Do it for children, you'll say, and I'll sneer,
How could I harm someone that isn't yet here?
I cant be to blame for what their life might be.
What have future generations e'er done for me?
I'll mine all the minerals, cut down all the trees.
Bespoil the air, then move on to the seas.
What difference make it? I've earned what I've got,
and nothing was given for which I've not fought.
And isn't this precisely what Darwin taught?
May the best man win, and take all of the pot!
I'm captain, o captain of this ship called home.
But I'm tired and hot now. Please, leave me alone.
Let's say we pick spots in the desert to store all our trash. How we do we move all the trash from the population centers to the landfill? Fleets of trucks and railcars which emit tons of CO2 and would be better used elsewhere in the economy.
If we place landfills closer to population centers, then there is a much high opportunity cost for more productive uses for that land and greater care required for preparing the landfill so that contaminants don't leak into the water supply.
Either way, it would be better to reduce landfill space as much as possible.
More philosophically, we can't just keep living this "throw away lifestyle". There is a finite amount of land and resources. My generation is growing up facing a total climate collapse, and this way of thinking is the major reason why.
I always feel weird reading all the drama regarding waste management in US. Of all countries I would have thought they would understand market economics the most.
If cleaning up waste is an externality, can’t you add in the price of that cleaning into the thing itself, thus doing that would be an economic activity in and off itself.
For example a plastic cup costs 1c to produce, but 1 dollar to clean up. Well can’t you force the price to be 1.01 and be done with it. then if you clean up after yourself you can “get that deposit back” or if you don’t care for it - someone will, because it would earn them a dollar?
I think Germany has a system like that and I’ve heard that it works for them - both socially and in that it keeps things clean. Though I’ve not been there personally to verify.
Yes, Germany has deposits on bottles and cans. E.g. small plastic coke bottles will have something like a 15c deposit. People tend to leave them around for homeless people to collect when they are on the go. It's a nice thing to do. All super markets have collection points where you get your deposit back as a receipt that you can cash in when paying for your groceries. The system works pretty well and it's pretty common for homeless people to show up there with bags full of bottles that they've collected.
They have another system at big beer festivals and beer gardens where people prefer to drink their beverages in glasses. Beer in plastic cups is just not acceptable here. These glasses have a deposit as well and you swap them for a clean and full one when you get a new drink and when you are done you get your deposit back when you return the glass.
This could work for coffee cups too. Just charge a dollar or so for a proper mug and simply put them in the dishwasher when people return them and give them a clean one. Only charge the deposit when they don't return one. Drinking from a proper mug is a superior drinking experience in any case.
As an economist I love this. People respond to incentives and making the decision visible, not making it a tax by letting the coffee shops keep the surcharge, and making it possible to keep prices the same (including the surcharge) is frankly a well designed law/experiment.
It's certainly a surprise for a government to go this route, though I'm not that optimistic.
If I understand it correctly, it just means that the surcharge needs to appear in the price listing, so I'd assume that customers will quickly learn to filter out that from their daily lives.
If anyone is looking for a good reusable coffee mug solution I've been quite pleased with the Zojirushi vacuum-insulated mugs.[1]
They keep your coffee hot for 6 hours, they don't seem to impart much if any of a taste on the coffee, they're easy to clean and they can really take a beating.
Ergonomically it's pretty well thought out. They have a switch mechanism that can either flip the lid open or lock it with a push of the thumb. It also works equally well for keeping ice coffee or water cold.
Surely plastic waste is a local problem for only some places? America has no shortage of empty land for landfills, but perhaps India or Singapore has more of a struggle to put it all somewhere. I live in a country with plenty of wasteland close to my city, and the landfills are well managed to prevent leaching, but people are still really passionate about not using them for plastic. Nobody seems to be able to explain why except to refer to the Pacific garbage patch, which isn't caused by us because our landfills are on land and not spilling into the sea (except that one time when a flooded river broke one open).
>Nobody seems to be able to explain why except to refer to the Pacific garbage patch, which isn't caused by us
It's probably caused by us in part. The US ships a huge amount of trash to Asia. [1] In fact, recycling as we know it in many places in the US only works by shipping it to Asia. For example, my city had problems when China created new recycling processing rules, which altered the economics of its recycling program. [2]
Its been shown that shipping this stuff over the Pacific isn't a totally clean process. When trash goes to Asian countries, it can fall off the container ships. And the receiving country doesn't have any standards on processing. Impurities can be tossed to the ocean with the country's regular garbage. But yes, Asian countries count for the lion's share of trash in the Pacific. [3]
That's a problem of recycling, not of using the local landfills.
Though not being accepted by China is kind of funny because they tightened their standard for contamination so if western households actually put the effort in to correctly cleaning and sorting their recycling, the contamination would be low enough that it can still be sent. I've heard there's a problem caused by people being too keen on recycling and putting greasy pizza boxes and plastic toys in because they don't realize it's not recyclable. I'm not sure why the collectors don't enforce strict rules and stop collecting from violators.
So... If you want to help the environment, you should not separate your plastic waste and instead put it with the general garbage so it ends up safely in a landfill. Honestly, I myself can't tell if I'm serious.
I think there is an easy solution: More expensive (like USD 1) foldable cups, that are expensive enough that people will actually re-use them.
In Sweden we have a model I like a lot, which is a modern, foldable version of a traditional saami drinking vissel called "kåsa": https://www.dentakit.com/foldingcup.html
They are often sold in hiking / outdoor shops etc. I'm sure someone could create a nice version suitable for take-away coffee.
Disposable coffee cups and there lids seem to make up most of the trash I see on the side of the road. Fast food boxes and cups being the other major one.
Around here (Northern Europe) (non-recycled) garbage has been burned for heat & electricity for a long time. Garbage is sometimes shipped between cities for this purpose (i.e. purchased)
I always assumed garbage was valuable in this way and that use of landfills was due to unavailable tech at the time. But perhaps the burning of garbage must be subsidized/have a high cost for processors...
I wonder if they could use the same model my local growler fill uses. You pay a deposit on the growler, and if you bring it back (don't worry about cleaning it or anything), you don't pay the deposit on the next 64oz of beer.
Dopper. Bottle and cup two-in-one. I got two (both ltd. ed.). The 2nd one is larger and insulated, and holds warm liquid for 9 hours, cold for a day. Great if you want to bring your own (herbal) tea to work. (Can't drink too much coffee.)
It is worth considering the likely second-order effects of this policy. For example, will people who buy Starbucks/Dunkin just use pod machines more frequently instead? Will they buy a coffee machine and make coffee at home, using a single filter for one cup? What are the environmental impacts of these behaviors?
I am especially poorly-positioned to answer these questions since I am not a coffee drinker, but it would probably be a good idea for policymakers to figure out how people will react to a policy like this. Otherwise we might end up with a poorly-target policy that either doesn't make things better (on net) or actually makes things worse.
For starters Starbucks (and others) could offer and encourage the use of “for here” glasses. My local Starbucks has a few “for here” mugs, but no glasses for cold drinks. Seems like low hanging fruit there.
I get plastic bags... they are a nuisance that cause alotmof problems.
But the coffee cup thing is just dumb, probably less useful than even the plastic straw crusade. There is close to zero actual biodegrading happening in landfills. Just tax the underlying soft drinks if you have a beef with cup consumption.
I'm not sure I like this trend. Who really wants to carry around an empty coffee cup wherever he goes? Or a metal straw? Or re-useable bags? Utensils will be next. There is a reason we have so much disposable stuff: unparalleled convenience.
The solution is to create better conveniences, not to ban them like luddites and go back to the 18th century.
Also, first world problems.
Also, despite first world problems, first world has other more important problems that should be solved, like drug addicts, homelessness, and crime, maybe the people's council should focus on that instead of this?
That's the solution, yes. But without an incentive, we'll never get there. The first step towards creating an incentive is to make it economically unfeasible to not have an incentive. It's not like people will stop drinking coffee, they'll demand an alternative and one will be created. If a plastic cup costs $0.17 and a biodegradable cup costs $0.18, businesses and consumers will choose plastic. Making plastic slightly more expensive than the healthier alternative creates that pressure so the market will come up with better options.
Cleaning up waste costs money, money that the maker of the cup doesn't pay. Money that Starbucks doesn't pay. Money that the consumer doesn't pay. It's only cheaper at the cost of the person who has to clean up the waste. Plastic is heavily subsidized by not having to pay for its own cleanup.
I don't see how any of your comment is relevant to any of mine, which was a pushback against the GP comment's recommendation to focus on local cost/benefit and feign ignorance of externalities
Pricing in externalities by adding a fee for incurring a social cost is a great way to get the free market to address problems. And it doesn't take away from fixing any of the other issues you mentioned.
I'm no solid waste expert, so I cannot comment on the utility of reducing disposable coffee cup waste in particular (as opposed to simply raising the price to consumers of trash disposal).
No, but homelessness will directly impact the environment, Genius. So while you're focusing an iota on cleaning up cups, you'll have people shitting on the street. Much better.
Maybe you don't know but people around the world like to point to SF as examples of places that prohibited plastic bottles, maybe for locals the real issues are the ones you mention but in the big picture to stop using one-time plastics and similar pollutants are the real issues.
As an Australian, I have images of homelessness whenever SF is mentioned. I didn't even know that SF prohibited plastic bottles and I've never heard anyone say that.
I'd also take a position that homelessness is the real issue in SF and not disposable coffee cup usage.
EDIT: reading about the plastic bottle ban in SF[0], it appears that it's very limited
> The new regulations prohibit the sale of plastic bottles at events held on city-owned property. Additionally, government agencies may not purchase bottled water.
> Private businesses such as grocery stores and mini markets may continue to sell bottled water in the city. To date, little data exists on how the regulations have reduced overall plastic bottle use.
> As an Australian, I have images of homelessness whenever SF is mentioned. I didn't even know that SF prohibited plastic bottles and I've never heard anyone say that.
Ditto, but I'm from Washington (just a hop and a skip across Oregon from California).
So why can't we spend all this money we're wasting debating what plastic stuff to ban figuring out how to recycle these things instead? (or down-cycle, plastic contaminated paper pulp from cups seems like a natural fit for filter media)
Recycling doesn't work. I recently read that only 10 % of plastic gets recycled. Recycling is just a way to pass responsibility onto the customer. Bans and regulations require the corporations to fix this problem.
Plastic is hard to recycle since there are multiple types and there can be multiple types in one product. Also generally the recycled plastic is not as strong and usable as the original type and it's more expensive. Recycling plastic is not the answer.
Most of the recycling claims by companies with the exception of aluminum is used as a way to make consumers feel better about using and trashing a product.
But we're not talking about recycling plastic. We're talking about products that can be recycled that are contaminated with plastic (e.g. plastic bags that clog up machines and plastic liners for paper products that presumably contaminate the paper pulp). It's a materials handling problem. It should be solvable.
The business was a media organization and it seemed to me like reporters were the worst culprits.
The company provided styrofoam cups which were consumed at a enormous rate, and this was deemed to be a better solution than trying to get journalists to rinse their cups.