This 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.

Not 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 (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.

"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?

While we're talking about coffee and recycling...I'm pretty sure there's more plastic in a K-cup then there is coffee.

They also still use plastic cups (and then give you a paper straw lol)

Easy. Just don’t go to Starbucks and drink your espresso at home in a cup.

We 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.

How 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?

this 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.

>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.

You could also just make your own coffee at home and cut out the entire environmental impact of doing business with a wasteful company at all. But this doesn't solve the problem of "I'm somewhere with no coffee, and I want coffee" which Starbucks does. Focusing on making their cups sustainable is probably a much better solution than expecting people to lug around coffee mugs all day.

Starbucks 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.

>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.

It's also systematically/institutionally discouraged at most places. It was before 2020, and even more so now.

Most places (e.g. many Starbucks) will not let you use a reusable cup when you actually try, even while advertising their "green" policies.

Go ahead and try it, most of the time they'll suggest you pour it into your own reusable cup right after they pour it into a disposable one for you.

There are many other reasons to avoid letting a corpo make your drink.

Coffeeshops (Costa and Starbucks) in the UK offers a 25p discount if you bring your own cup.

Just be aware that there are some strange terms and conditions: Costa requires you to have a lid, or else they can refuse to use it, the rule seems bizarre since they will happily fill your coffee in a lidless ceramic mug, but if you bring a lidless metal thermo mug like mine it is a no-go: https://www.snowpeak.com/collections/mugs/products/ti-double...

> We put together the proposal, and we made it to the leadership of the dining program before the woman in charge vetoed it. Her reasoning? "This idea just makes me cringe." That was the end of it.

Which university was that?

Excellent point - over 60% of the lifecycle costs of a cup are in the earlier phases (like raw materials, production, and transport).

So bringing your own cup is by FAR the best way to mitigate your own personal footprint.

I've seen someone bring their own bags to the grocery store like four or five times since the bag ban got implemented here in LA County. Everyone just gets the thicker plastic "reusable" bags and treats them as disposable. Honestly I think it has made things worse when it comes to the amount of plastic use.