The more environmentally friendly option absolves us of guilt and problems of over-consumption are never challenged. Dropping in greener alternatives without dialling down consumption is a beguiling idea. Now the global population is 8 billion people and the environmental impact is mind-boggling.įor a while it looked like compostable packaging would provide problem-free convenience.
A little over a century later Covid would prompt a surge in single use cups, disposable cutlery and take-home containers, prompting us to shelve our reusable cup collection. A tiny fraction of that global population had access to and the means to afford his disposable cups. The global population in 1907 when a Boston lawyer dreamt up a sanitary drinking cup was 1.7 billion people. Cafes and coffee trucks could serve thousands of customers without the need for seating or the staff costs of washing cups.Īnd who would worry about a few paper cups? Weren’t they made from paper, a renewable resource? It seemed like a win-win. We went much more Boston than Berlin when it came to our coffee culture, and a coffee boom ensued. Lingering over coffee in a porcelain cup served in a cafe or diner became the exceptional way to consume a hot beverage. The takeout coffee became a status symbol a busy successful life needed coffee to go. The lid arrived in the 1990s driven by cappuccinos, lattes and other fancy varieties of coffee that needed domed space for their fluffy heads. Polystyrene replaced paper in the 1950s and then fell out of favour. Suddenly disposable meant clean, and dixie cups became a public health measure. Their big break came with the 1918 flu epidemic. He renamed it a dixie cup after dixie dolls, a popular toy at the time. Luellen’s waxed paper cup was charged at a penny a go when it was first rolled out. Lawrence Luellen was upset by the public drinking water systems where a communal tin cup, or tin dipper, was attached to the fountain with a chain, to be shared by anyone who was thirsty. If we start with the coffee cups so many of us use, could a reuse culture spread into other areas of life?īut first back to 1907 when the American invention of the disposable cup, or “health kup”, is credited to a fastidious Boston lawyer. The ending of the disposable cup habit is something of a first step. And there are smart people devising smarter conveniences that might not burn the place down around our ears. Make-use-and-toss needs to come to an end. As long as disposal is cheap we just throw it away and produce more.” “We design for the dump, focused on the production and the monetisation of production and consumption. Economist Madhavi Venkatesan explains it brilliantly in her podcast Sustainable Solutions: “We are in a cradle to grave economy,” she says, explaining the alternative concept of a circular economy. Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Timesīut the disposable cup is a ubiquitous part of the Make-Use-Toss culture driving the climate and biodiversity crises. The pandemic drove reusable cups back into cupboards as people stayed home and coffee shops closed or went take-out only. Eliminating disposable coffee cups alone won’t save us from catastrophic ecosystem collapse. Dubbed a “latte levy” (because who doesn’t love a bit of snappy alliteration?) the levy isn’t on the liquid, but on the single use cup. This will become a more expensive habit later this year when the Government puts an environmental levy of 20c on disposable cups. An estimated four million disposable cups hit bins, footpaths, waterways and motorway verges every week in Ireland.
We are hooked on the convenience of a single use cup, comforting ourselves that it’s compostable, if we even pause to think about it. They spend an average of 13 minutes in our hands before we toss them away. So every day, around half a million caffeine fixes are served in disposable cups in Ireland. More than two thirds of us own a reusable cup, but fewer than one in three is actually using it at a coffee counter regularly. I’m not alone in my keep (it-in-the-cupboard) cup habit. If only I didn’t keep forgetting to bring one with me when I leave the house. My favourite one looks like corrugated cardboard.
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