51–60 of 75 posts
We need to stop trying to recycle things, and start burning them for energy. It's simply better for the environment. It suffers from not "looking" green, which matters far more to people than actually being green.
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Wondering what the economics of keeping single use cups but making them out of aluminum would look like? It’s one of the more valuable recyclables (to the point where homeless people will collect them to make some money).
Is aluminum recycling actually valuable to society, or is it only valuable due to the deposit?
https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/12/20862775/aluminum-recycli...
> The Aluminum Association, an industry group, says that almost 75 percent of all the aluminum ever produced to date is still in use today.
> Recycling aluminum saves about 90 percent of the energy it takes to make new aluminum, which is great since mining bauxite ore and turning it into aluminum is pretty environmentally destructive and energy-intensive. It takes about twice as much energy to produce new aluminum as it does to produce new plastic.
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That’s how it still worked in the 90s in post-communist Central European countries. Then we got flooded with plastic just like the Westerners.
Similar thing in Austin, TX. City banned single use plastic bags, so HEB (the largest grocer) introduced durable reusable plastic bags to purchase. Unsurprisingly, people ate the cost, treated them like single use bags, and now we have an even worse waste problem. Liberal policymaking in a nutshell.
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…
Excellent point - over 60% of the lifecycle costs of a cup are in the earlier phases (like raw materials, production, and transport). So bringing your own cup is by FAR the best way to mitigate your own personal footprint.
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>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. 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…
Arguably, from an environmental and resources standpoint, isn't it better to centralize coffee-making in a few coffee shops rather everyone having their own coffee making equipment at home?
We need to stop trying to recycle things, and start burning them for energy. It's simply better for the environment. It suffers from not "looking" green, which matters far more to people than actually being green.
It's not really better for the environment because you have all the byproducts of the combustion, some of which can be pretty toxic themselves.
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Arguably, from an environmental and resources standpoint, isn't it better to centralize coffee-making in a few coffee shops rather everyone having their own coffee making equipment at home?
How could that possibly be better environmentally? You're introducing a great deal more commuting (remember, most of the US is not walkable, people aren't walking to coffee shops and their places of work) and idle time for vehicles. And if the shops are consuming a great deal of single-use resources it will produce more waste than making coffee at home, where most people have mugs.
This is misguided. Let's say this campaign succeeds. Maybe 10% of the cups will be recycled, leaving still a ton of waste. It would be much more effective to campaign against single-use cups. I grew up in a time in which you had to bring an empty bottle glass bottle to a shop, and they would take it and give you a full one, which you'd bring back empty next time. If you didn't have one, you'd leave a deposit (effecti…
We need to have Starbucks (and all coffee shops for that matter) offer the option to pay on a sliding scale so you can fill up your 30oz Yeti and pay accordingly. That would be too pro-consumer though.
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> We put together the proposal, and we made it to the leadership of the dining program before the woman in charge vetoed it. Her reasoning? "This idea just makes me cringe." That was the end of it. Which university was that?
UCLA.
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How could that possibly be better environmentally? You're introducing a great deal more commuting (remember, most of the US is not walkable, people aren't walking to coffee shops and their places of work) and idle time for vehicles. And if the shops are consuming a great deal of single-use resources it will produce more waste than making coffee at home, where most people have mugs.
From a pure energy standpoint, simple thermodynamics would dictate he's right. Producing industrial quantities of coffee in a commercial brewer would be much more efficient than individual coffee pots. However all the confounding factors you mention probably balance it in favor of home production.
It could maybe make sense for commuters who have shops on their way to their place of work and who only want one cup of coffee at the start of their work day. But this completely neglects everyone who:
1. Works from home (or doesn't work)
2. Doesn't have a shop that's on their way to their workplace
3. Wants more than one cup of coffee