First was plastic bags. Coffee cups are next
Nations, cities ban to-go containers to cut down on trash
The People’s Republic of Berkeley, Calif., takes pride in its leadership on all things civic and environmental. The small liberal city east of San Francisco was one of the first U.S. cities to adopt curbside recycling. It banned Styrofoam and was early to take on plastic shopping bags. Earlier this year, the Berkeley City Council put on notice a new environmental scourge: the to-go coffee cup.
About 40 million disposable cups get tossed in the city each year, according to the City Council, almost one per resident per day. So in January, the city said it will require coffee shops to charge an extra 25 cents for customers who use a takeaway cup. “Waiting is no longer an option,” Sophie Hahn, the Berkeley City Council member who wrote the ordinance, said at the time.
Overwhelmed by trash, jurisdictions around the world are banning single-use plastic takeaway containers and cups. Europe says plastic beverage cups have to go by 2021. India wants them out by 2022. Taiwan set a deadline of 2030. Surcharges such as Berkeley’s are likely to get more common in an attempt to quickly change consumer behavior before more outright bans.
For chains such as Starbucks, which goes through about 6 billion cups a year, this represents
no less than an existential dilemma. Dunkin’ recently renamed itself to de-emphasize its doughnut origins and now makes close to 70 percent of its revenue from coffee drinks. But it’s also a pressing problem for Mcdonald’s and the fast-food industry as a whole.
Executives have been working on a more environmentally friendly alternative to the plasticlined, double-walled, plastic-lidded paper cup for more than a decade. It hasn’t gone that well.
“It nags at my soul,” said Scott Murphy, COO of Dunkin’ Brands Group, which goes through 1 billion coffee cups a year. He’s been working on the chain’s cup redesign since it pledged to stop using foam in 2010. This year, its stores are finally making the transition to paper cups, and they continue to tinker with new materials and designs.
“It’s a little more complicated than people give us credit for,” Murphy said. “That cup is sort of the most intimate interaction with our consumer. It’s a big part of our brand and our heritage.”
The U.S. accounts for about 120 billion paper, plastic and foam coffee cups each year, or about one-fifth of global total. Almost every last one of them — 99.75 percent — ends up as trash, where even paper cups can take more than 20 years to decompose.
A wave of plastic bag bans has inspired the new efforts to curb cup trash. Food and beverage containers are a much bigger problem, sometimes generating 20 times the garbage that plastic bags do in any one locale. But reverting to reusable cloth bags is relatively easy. With to-go coffee cups, there’s no simple alternative. Berkeley is encouraging residents to bring a travel mug, and both Starbucks and Dunkin’ give discounts to those who do.
Coffee shops know reusable cups are a good solution, but at franchises they can be sort of an “operational nightmare,” said Dunkin’s Murphy. Servers never know whether a cup is dirty or if they should wash it, and it’s hard to know how much to fill a small or medium coffee in a large mug.
So companies keep working on a better cup.
It took nine years for Dunkin’ to figure out an alternative to its signature foam cup. An early attempt required new lids, themselves difficult to recycle. Prototypes made out of 100 percent recycled materials buckled and tipped on the bottom. A cup made of mushroom fibers promised to decompose easily, but it was too expensive to scale up at large volumes.
The chain finally settled on a double-walled plastic-lined paper cup, thick enough to protect sippers’ hands and compatible with existing lids. They’re made from ethically sourced paper and biodegrade faster than foam, but that’s about it — they’re more expensive to make and aren’t recyclable most places.
Paper cups are notoriously difficult to recycle. Recyclers worry the plastic linings will gum up their machines, so they nearly always send them to trash.
Mcdonald’s recently teamed with Starbucks and other quickserve restaurants to back the $10 million Nextgen Cup Challenge — a “moon shot” to develop, accelerate and scale a more sustainable to-go cup.
“We’re looking for solutions that are near-term commercially viable and things that are aspirational,” said Bridget Croke, vice president of external affairs at Closed Loop Partners, a recycling-focused investment firm which is managing the challenge.