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Impact Campaign: SEAL Calls On Starbucks To #UpTheCup
- lp0_on_fire 5y agoWhile we're talking about coffee and recycling...I'm pretty sure there's more plastic in a K-cup then there is coffee.
- cj 5y agoThankfully, they make reusable k-cups that work surprisingly well and much cheaper than disposable ones. I highly recommend.
- lp0_on_fire 5y agoOh for sure - the reusable ones are great. That being said...it negates the "convenience" factor that attracted me to the Keurig in the first place. I ended up switching back to a regular drip coffee maker with a built-in grinder
- yujian 5y agoThey also still use plastic cups (and then give you a paper straw lol)
- mattharney 5y agoYup. The sheer volume of single-use waste our society generates - especially in the US - is ridiculous. For literally seconds and minutes of use! While leaving pollution behind best measured in decades!
- tckerr 5y agoThe paper straws are horrible, borderline unusable.
- jazzyjackson 5y agolol I don’t think your comment deserved to be killed, you’re right. Paper cups are just as un-usable without the plastic coating. Still the pollution is a high cost for the convenience of coffee to go. Maybe the best solution is to make sure everyone to have time to make coffee at home instead of going to a drive through Starbucks (drive through takes same amount of time really) …Or be less addicted to sugar and caffeine.
- Claire42 5y agoPeople actually try to recycle the paper cups thinking that they are recyclable.
- diego 5y agoThis is misguided. Let's say this campaign succeeds. Maybe 10% of the cups will be recycled, leaving still a ton of waste. It would be much more effective to campaign against single-use cups. I grew up in a time in which you had to bring an empty bottle glass bottle to a shop, and they would take it and give you a full one, which you'd bring back empty next time. If you didn't have one, you'd leave a deposit (effectively buying your first bottle). There is nothing wrong with that system. You forgot to bring your cup to Starbucks? Fine, buy one. Don't want to keep it? Bring it back when you're done and they credit you the deposit.
- wrzuteczka 5y agoThat’s how it still worked in the 90s in post-communist Central European countries. Then we got flooded with plastic just like the Westerners.
- underseacables 5y agoI was amazed in Berlin the recycling program that makes it very easy to recycle cans and bottles. People made it a job to pickup and search through trash so they could recycle. A can deposit would be welcomed, but maybe I’m old and just remember crushing cans to fill up trash bags to get $7. Sure was fun to get that money as a kid.
- Claire42 5y agoYeah but in the USA the recycling infrastructure is very different from state to state, so implementing something on a national level is not a viable solution.
- frosted-flakes 5y agoSome places you don't get the deposit if the can is crushed, because they need to be able to read the barcode. Which is insane, because crushed cans take up a fraction of the space of whole cans and only makes the recycling process more complex.
- mjevans 5y ago"The paper cups Starbucks currently uses contain a plastic lining" When someone says "Paper" cup, I assume paper and some kind of wax as a sealant, not plastic. I wonder if this violates any kind of FDA or FTC rules?
- jazzyjackson 5y agoStarbucks isn’t special here, it’s a waterproof cup. I always assumed it was some kind of wax too so I also had a flashback to all the paper cups I threw in a recycling can [0]. But on second thought, what kind of wax deals well with water at 95C ? They’re all plastic coated. [0] I guess most recycling is land filled or dumped in the ocean anyway, so my sins didn’t affect much of the outcome
- tootie 5y agoIsn't the material used irrelevant though? You can't recycle any paper product once it's been stained with food.
- papito 5y agoBut all food containers are like that. They are not recyclable. In fact, MOST things that you'd expected to be recyclable are not. Your bottle doesn't have a cap on? It will sink in water and end up in a landfill. Glass other color than clear? Landfill. And so on.
- omega3 5y agoI was recently surprised to learn that metal cans are also lined with plastic.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- alecst 5y agoNot only are they not recyclable, but there's a water cost, energy cost, and a pollution cost to making them. Obviously the fate of humanity doesn't depend on what we do with our coffee cups. But in my opinion the best solution is to have people bring their own cups and just reuse them, and unfortunately only a small percent of people do that. Back in grad school, to get people to bring their own cups more often, we had the idea to leverage the concept of loss aversion, inspired by the grocery bag "ban" in Los Angeles: If coffee cost $1.10, instead of giving a $.10 discount for bringing your own cup, we'd lower the price of coffee to $1.00 and charge an extra $.10 for the cup that you forgot to bring. It turned that another student at Tufts had had the same idea, actually implemented the pilot program at their Tower Cafe, and got great results. Same level of reduction that you get from charging people to bring their own grocery bags. So with the proof of concept, student surveys, theory behind the idea, etc. we put together the proposal. Six months later we presented to the leadership of the dining program. But the person in charge vetoed it. Her reasoning? "This idea just makes me cringe." And that was the end of it. I believe this is an idea with long legs and I'm still willing to work on it. Maybe someday soon. You can read the presentation here: https://a.tmp.ninja/WXcXxXh.pdf https://a.tmp.ninja/WXcXxXh.pdf (I just picked a random filehosting service, let me know if there's something better out there.) By the way, everything we know about cup recyclability, Starbucks also knows (and knew in the 1990s). And, if I recall correctly, they knew also knew that providing a discount for bringing your own cup _did not_ increase the rate at which people did it. (If there's enough interest I'll dig up the paper, and I can check if my memory serves me right.) Unfortunately there hasn't been a lot of pressure on Starbucks to change. This, in my opinion, is not a problem that should be solved with good faith alone, but rather with some kind of tax/fine that applies to all players in the game. Kind of the like the bag ban and grocery store chains. I'm particularly fond of the "charging for cups" idea because you can then use that money to fund recycling or waste cleanup programs.
- Jtsummers 5y agoStarbucks offered a discount for bringing your own cup for coffee. Though I rarely got anything other than their plain coffee so I honestly don't know if that discount also applied to the "fancy" drinks. I know they stopped letting you bring your own cup in 2020, not sure if they've resumed their use.
- underseacables 5y agoHow much waste is generated by the drive through windows? Let’s say for talking purposes all fast food places you had to dine in, no drive through. Would this reduce single use packaging and all that goes with it?
- frosted-flakes 5y agoMost fast food places are not equipped with dishwashing facilities, but I'm sure they could be added. The only place I know that offers glassware to dine-in customers is Tim Hortons, and that's on hold because of the pandemic. If you just mean the additional packaging for drive-through customers, not much difference. Just a paper bag.
- ars 5y agoWe need to stop trying to recycle things, and start burning them for energy. It's simply better for the environment. It suffers from not "looking" green, which matters far more to people than actually being green.
- Claire42 5y agoI would be interested if you have a source for that.
- papito 5y agoPlasma, bitches!
- OldTimeCoffee 5y agoIt's not really better for the environment because you have all the byproducts of the combustion, some of which can be pretty toxic themselves.
- pomian 5y agoUnless you sustain 1850°C
- OldTimeCoffee 5y agoSure, good luck with the vessel at that temp
- ars 5y agoCeramics can handle it easily.
- athenot 5y agoThis is referred to as Waste Valorization[1] and is common in Europe with high temperature incinerators. [1] There are other forms of valorization other than heat generation; but this one is the easiest to implement at scale.
- 5y ago
- wtf77 5y agoEasy. Just don’t go to Starbucks and drink your espresso at home in a cup.
- fsckboy 5y agothis is a distraction: paper and plastic, recycled or not, are not a huge pollution problem, they're just not. they do just fine in landfills, and the world is frankly not running out of space for burying them. There are important environmental issues to address, and exhausting everybody's patience on completely non toxic, inert or biodegradable "stuff" is missing the opportunity to focus attention on actual threats to health, safety and the future.