The debate about paper coffee cups

I was complaining in a coffee forum about Starbucks's use of paper cups when ceramicware was available. http://groups.google.ca/group/alt-coffee-moderated/browse_frm/thread/a51d7883bd31739b . The fourth message raises questions about the net good of using ceramic based on the energy it takes to make ceramicware. Now I'm not so sure about bothering coffee shops to environmentally shape up. Can anyone here who is in touch with the scientific side comment?

 

The poster you mention is more or less correct.

The energy cost to make a cheap plastic/paper/whatever cup is fairly low.
It often costs more in energy to wash it once.

When you add hygiene issues, ceramic/glass sharp fragment risks, etc, it ends up just cheaper and less hassle to use paper cups.

Whether it's more environmentally friendly is another question, I would suppose it would depend what happened to the paper cups after they were "disposed of". I could well imagine that the two methods don't work out all that different.

Frankly in your average coffee shop, the actual use of coffee cups is probably one of the more minor environmental impacts, compared to the actual sourcing of the coffee, and all the other energy intensive amenities...

 

I'm trying to look at it from an overall cost viewpoint, including cost to the environment (which I guess equates to the dollar cost of fixing the problems created). From everything I've seen, there is almost no exception to the fact that paper cups go into the common garbage pool, and then into landfill. In light of this, how would ceramic compare? Is there a concrete way to substantiate its advantage or disadvantage?

 

why anyone would drink starbucks coffee is completely beyond me

 

paper cups are hardly plastic cups. It's more the responsibility of the user to recycle their litter than the distributor to cut down on production.

Plastic beer cups are a bigger concern, when you can make imitation cups which are exactly the same out of sugar cane.

 

they might like coffee, perhaps?

 

They like keeping costs tall... bearing in mind the venti picture. Sounds like a grande problem.

 

Brilliant

 

lameucinno

 

I thought that was a McD offering... in paper cups.

 

what i have tasted at starbucks suggests the opposite

 

I hate to tell you this, but it couldn't have been coffee. But then, with an attitude like yours, can you blame them!!??

 

my attitude comes from being a home roaster, who doesn't care much for burnt beans

go figure...

 

i am always amused by the idea that this is the 'hip forums'

and that anyone thinks that patronizing a company that is monopolistic and unfair to coffee producers [among other problems] is in any way 'hip'

time for a cup of ethiopian yirgacheffe kochere, roasted just under full city . . .

 

My bad. I thought of paper cups and plastic cups as equally bad. In my neck of the woods, they are for practical purposes equally bad because there are no public bins for recycling paper cups. Residential recycling does not accept them either: http://www.ottawa.ca/residents/recycling_garbage/recycling/blackbox_en.html . So both paper cups and plastic cups go into the landfill, regardless of whether the user wants to recycle them, and nothing decomposes in the landfill. I would say that the use of paper and plastic cups are (to a first order) equivalent because coffee goes into paper, but smoothies and ice tea goes into plastic.

 

What's your opinion of The Second Cup?

 

i don't know them

 

Why not promote discounts for those that bring their own cups? Hygiene is their problem. Remember- reduce, reuse, recycle!

 

But that would cut into the passive product promotion of having a company logo visible on refuse.

 

Here, with Tim Hortons we can purchase a travel type mug from them and if you take it in they refill it at the same cost as a coffee. The travel mug holds a little more so you get a couple of extra sips of coffee and are using your own mug.