| 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. |
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.