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Coffee Cups Are Next

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Re: Coffee Cups Are Next

#421

Post by 01100011 »

acchow wrote: post #412
01100011 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landfills are storage units and will likely turn into vast repositories of useful materials when we have the energy and technology to sort through them. What is wrong with styrofoam piling up? According to wikipedia, styrofoam doesn't essentially last forever. Also, what's with the downvotes for asking a question? This place really seems to be going the way of reddit. Too bad... was a nice place to discuss the facts…

It's not dogma. You are saying "what's wrong with using things once then shoving it in a landfill". That behavior doesn't scale and is unsustainable. And that mentality leads to ever increasing pollution.

No, what I'm saying is, what's wrong with storing things in a landfill until it is economically feasible to reprocess them.

At some point, we're going to want to dig up the resources in a landfill. They're much more concentrated than in the natural environment.

The dogma is thinking landfills are one-way collection systems which grow without bound. As long as they're not leaking into the environment, they seem like perfectly reasonable ways of storing things we do not currently have a use for.

Re: Coffee Cups Are Next

#422

Post by bArray »

antisthenes wrote: post #131
bArray wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From what I've read the reusables have to be used ~70 > times to be more environmentally friendly than the current > disposables. Is this assuming it goes into landfill afterwards? Does it look better if you use something more easily recyclable? I think metal is a pretty good candidate: you can get it pretty thin, it's durable, keeps the coffee hot, light and easily cleaned. You just need to ensure that customers a…

How about that corrugated cardboard heat protector for the reusable metal cup? I think combined with reusable metal cups, it could help.

I was thinking about that, but I'm not sure cardboard is a very high grade recyclable (materials made from it tend to be low quality). I was trying to think of something that itself could be more easily reused, like wood (although manufacturing would be awful).

Re: Coffee Cups Are Next

#423

Post by bArray »

maccard wrote: post #362
bArray wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From what I've read the reusables have to be used ~70 > times to be more environmentally friendly than the current > disposables. Is this assuming it goes into landfill afterwards? Does it look better if you use something more easily recyclable? I think metal is a pretty good candidate: you can get it pretty thin, it's durable, keeps the coffee hot, light and easily cleaned. You just need to ensure that customers a…

> Is this assuming it goes into landfill afterwards? Does it look better if you use something more easily recyclable? Yes, it does, and yes it does. However, getting the waste to the right place is also problematic. According to BBC[0] despite the fact that the cups are technically recyclable, lamost all of them end up in landfill anyway. [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-43739043

That and a lot of recyclable material ends up pilled up, with China almost completely refusing to accept it for processing.

Re: Coffee Cups Are Next

#424

Post by bArray »

neuronic wrote: post #261
bArray wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - The cup has to retail for 17 cents. Like plastic bags in supermarkets, can't one just put the onus on the customer to pay the cost of the container if they don't bring their own?

Their needs to be a penalty. Another 17 cents on my coffee just dont mean anything when I buy a $4,50 coffee at Starbucks.... (I usually dont buy at Starbucks, but the point stands)

A penalty, or a reward for reusing the container. If your coffee became $3 and you buy one or more a day, that's a reasonable saving over a year for the customers. Pin that with something that makes a public statement that you care about the environment and perhaps there's something here.

Re: Coffee Cups Are Next

#425

Post by kristopolous »

gedy wrote: post #387
kristopolous wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how were they sourced? How were they manufactured? How did they get to the point of consumption? How were they packaged when they arrived? How do they get to the garbage site? You have to include all the steps of how it got from tree to your hand and your hand back into the Earth. There's still plenty of pollution in that process even if the object itself isn't part of it.

> And how were they sourced? How were they manufactured? How did they get to the point of consumption? Like it's better from reusable cups? Basically will likely be ceramic, plastic, and metal from China, hauled across the ocean in some hugely polluting ship. No thanks.

zero is currently unachievable, fine. But something that reduces the footprint by 99% shouldn't be discarded because it's 1% away from perfection.

I have a zojirushi mug that lasts about 2-3 years. I use it daily and keep it in my bag. It's been in 8 countries this year alone. It probably saves about 600 or so cups so even if it is 10 times more energy to build the canister I have it's still 98% less aggregate energy.

A reduction of 2 orders of magnitude is quite substantial.

The gains here from simply using a reusable cup are equivalent to say, getting a car that got 3000 mpg but had some minor inconvenience such as needing 3 minutes to warm up when you turned it on.

Re: Coffee Cups Are Next

#426

Post by blackflame7000 »

megaremote wrote: post #162
blackflame7000 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but you should probably do something about the bigger problem first because there's no point in re-carpeting if the house is on fire

So, we should never do anything until all the starving are fed, and all murders and rapists are locked up? Genius.

No, but homelessness will directly impact the environment, Genius. So while you're focusing an iota on cleaning up cups, you'll have people shitting on the street. Much better.

Re: Coffee Cups Are Next

#427

Post by baroffoos »

wemdyjreichert wrote: post #381
omegabravo wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Australia, the laws refer to the Australian Standards (ie. AS3000 for the electrical code). These are updated as necessary with out an act of parliament. Regulation delay is a feature here, as we don't need a new standard every couple of years.

No one in America needs a new standard either. Literally no piece of gear I own has usb-c, except for one on my laptop which is not the primary charging port and I do not ever use (due to the traditional lineup of ports being available). I get switching can be a pain, but most people (the people regulation is crafted to cover) do not upgrade on the schedule of many tech enthusiasts. Consumers are also keeping devices…

It seems like we are still in a transition period. Every host device I have like my laptop and phone uses usb c and every accessory like my headphones and bike lights charge on micro usb even though they are new models. I'm guessing the reason for this may be that microusb is cheaper and offers no downsides when only used for charging.

Re: Coffee Cups Are Next

#429

Post by lopmotr »

chomp wrote: post #77
lopmotr wrote: post #17

Surely plastic waste is a local problem for only some places? America has no shortage of empty land for landfills, but perhaps India or Singapore has more of a struggle to put it all somewhere. I live in a country with plenty of wasteland close to my city, and the landfills are well managed to prevent leaching, but people are still really passionate about not using them for plastic. Nobody seems to be able to explain…

>Nobody seems to be able to explain why except to refer to the Pacific garbage patch, which isn't caused by us It's probably caused by us in part. The US ships a huge amount of trash to Asia. [1] In fact, recycling as we know it in many places in the US only works by shipping it to Asia. For example, my city had problems when China created new recycling processing rules, which altered the economics of its recycling p…

That's a problem of recycling, not of using the local landfills.

Though not being accepted by China is kind of funny because they tightened their standard for contamination so if western households actually put the effort in to correctly cleaning and sorting their recycling, the contamination would be low enough that it can still be sent. I've heard there's a problem caused by people being too keen on recycling and putting greasy pizza boxes and plastic toys in because they don't realize it's not recyclable. I'm not sure why the collectors don't enforce strict rules and stop collecting from violators.

Re: Coffee Cups Are Next

#430

Post by mft_ »

zrobotics wrote: post #395
brador wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> train people how to use the dishwashers If any workplace ever implements this - leave. I'm not paying my engineers $200k a year to load a dishwasher for even a minute. We have cleaners who do it as part of their rotation, anything else and you're running a clown show.

So do you use LOC as the primary metric for productivity? I've definitely had insights into a current project while performing a mindless task like washing dishes, in fact there are certain times where I will seek out a task like that. To me, the bigger WTF is having to train people to use a dishwasher--hopefully that is something most adults can be expected to know how to do already.

> To me, the bigger WTF is having to train people to use a dishwasher--hopefully that is something most adults can be expected to know how to do already.

You'd think, but in this case it is surprisingly unintuitive. The machine is a small high-throughput commercial grade item (takes just a few minutes per wash) which has little in common with home dishwashers. Further, its touchscreen interface is honestly really confusing. It took me a few goes and several wrong turns before I got it right, and this was with motivation.

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