Single-use products like coffee cups create a huge amount of waste in our environment for little good reason. Most of these aren’t recyclable at nearly any facility anyway, but even if they were, recycling facilities are shutting down and in crisis across a number of countries. Further, recycling isn’t an energy-free pass.
With 500 billion disposable cups used annually (1 million disposable cups end up in landfill every minute), inconvenience really doesn’t cut it for easy consumer-actions like this. The system is a mess and we require so much big, top-down action, but this is simple. The less waste we create, the better. Recyclable or not. Bring your own reusable cup, use a glass jar, sit down at a cafe to drink instead or head only to cafes that have a borrowing mug station. If you’re heading out from the office, and don’t have your cup on you, grab a mug from the kitchen.
The only thing we haven’t found an ideal solution for is that sometimes we like to grab a warm coffee or tea and sit down with someone who doesn’t have housing at the moment whatever city we happen to be in. We still grab the takeaway cup for this. There’s a flat foldable paper cup solution that’s hard to get your hands on but we have been trying to order a whole bunch of these so we can all carry a few in our bags 🙂 If you’ve got another suggestion (or happen to have designed a better solution) or you do something else that works, let us know.
