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.
Having a bottle deposit would surely be more environmentally friendly, but it would also generate more friction in the sales process and Starbucks would have to consider the business impact. Switching the coating of the cup is, according to the petition, "cost neutral" and there is no real downside to this change, assuming that the recyclable cups are of comparable quality. It seems like an easy and obvious change to make.
Also, switching to recyclable cups doesn't prevent Starbucks from implementing a bottle deposit, if they choose to do so later on.
When it comes to single plastic usage I think that putting all the pressure on customers, individuals is simply wrong and not enough, I'm convinced that serious pressure needs to be placed on manufacturers, amount and count of used packaging materials taxed or something like this. Recently I received box of pralines as a gift - amount of various materials used to deliver 15 pieces of chocolate is absolutely insane, ridiculous: hard translucent plastic case, tinfoil, tinfoil pressed/glued with plastic wrapping, lacquered glued paper, non-lacquered paper, plastic tray - there are tons of products like this one on stores shelves and I'm disillusioned and don't believe at all that it's getting "recycled"
In addition to above I don't believe that just putting garbage in the correct bin is enough effort from customer's side, it's just not.
Liberal policymaking in a nutshell.
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.
[0] https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2021/starbucks-brings-...
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.
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...
My proposal was to change the way this "discount" is realized -- by giving everyone the discount, and then only charging people who buy the cups.
Which university was that?
So bringing your own cup is by FAR the best way to mitigate your own personal footprint.
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?
[0] I guess most recycling is land filled or dumped in the ocean anyway, so my sins didn’t affect much of the outcome
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
For literally seconds and minutes of use! While leaving pollution behind best measured in decades!
…Or be less addicted to sugar and caffeine.
It's simply better for the environment.
It suffers from not "looking" green, which matters far more to people than actually being green.
[1] There are other forms of valorization other than heat generation; but this one is the easiest to implement at scale.
If you just mean the additional packaging for drive-through customers, not much difference. Just a paper bag.
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.
