Keep Cup epiphany.

It's been over a year since I've posted on the Portland Cup blog. I've been busy with coffee roaster air cleaning systems (see youtube vids here:Cellar Door, Rochester, NY), helping open a bar/restaurant upstairs from the Cellar Door (http://www.2ndstorypdx.com) being a dad, and keeping it all afloat during the great recession.

It also seemed that I wasn't stumbling into the right people with the right product or know-how to produce the cup I'd been dreaming of. The kind of cup that could make the Portland Cup project a reality. I'd been looking hard at all sorts of cups in catalogs and on store shelves around the country, but nobody seemed to value the same criteria I did. That all changed a week or two ago when a customer walked in to the cafe with a Keep Cup (http://www.keepcup.com).

Beautiful design and as is, or with slight mods, the best cup for the Portland Cup system I've seen yet. I hope to contact the folks from Keep Cup soon.

Sip + Cellar Door = Power!!

I was chatting with Brian the brain (anagram!) behind the Sip juice bar etc cart that sits in the tiny piazza of People's Food Co-op in Southeast Portland...when Brian broached THE SUBJECT.

He was sick of sending folks off with a "compostable" cup full of the finest organic ingredients, artfully prepared, knowing that the cup would probably end up in the landfill and he was paying good money to allow this to happen.

Of course it would be "nice" if this whole eco, green, compostable thing really worked, but let's face it. Growing a ton of corn (with the requisite water, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, fuel) to make a ton of plastic cups (more energy) that get trucked here (more fuel) and that no one can get to compost at home (they just sit there) and no one can seem to get into a commercial compost can (not available at home or on the street; BUT if they did, it would still be trucked up to Cedar Grove near Seattle) and thus ends up in the landfill is not the model of sustainability.

What Brian wanted is the Portland Cup! He didn't want just another logo-branded travel mug that he'd order by the case, sell to his customers, and then watch as a good percentage of them regularly forgot to use them. He wanted a SYSTEM that he could plug into. A system of ubiquitous, durable, reusable, washable, cups that will help Sip, Cellar Door Coffee Roasters (our little business), and other businesses like ours to realize our dream of kicking the disposable cup habit.

To that end, Brian and I are going to spend the next 2 weeks refining our economic business models for Portland cup using our "Street MBAs". We'll then meet and try to hash out a master plan for Portland Cup Beta. If you've got input, let Brian or myself (Jeremy) know.

Should be some public announcements soonish!

Green Concept

We used compostable cups for a couple of years, starting with our first foray into the farmers' market. At that time we could capture a decent number of the cups and get them composted since we had a captive audience at the market. Once we stopped doing markets and did all of our "for here" coffee in ceramic, paying extra for compostable to-go cups made with suspect corn that would end up in the landfill anyway seemed less wise.

We had a rep bring us some unsolicited samples of "green" cups and lids yesterday. She represents a Taiwanese company that has a North American base in Toronto, a city that's been contemplating a paper cup ban. We talked about which strain of PLA they used and how their cups were compostable and not just biodegradable like some competitors. We also talked about how most of the potentially compostable cups she wanted me to buy would end up in landfills anyway. But as she put it, customers don't really care. They just want to be "green", and this "green trend" is very popular right now, and many businesses are going with the "green concept", etc. All sort of reminds me of the 5th Element. Whole lot of "green", whatever that means.

The most interesting thing to me was her company's supply chain. The paper stock was made in China, then the heat-resistant PLA lining is applied to the paper in Japan (which has apparently mastered this art), then back to China for printing cutting and forming of the cups. Then the finished cups are put in container ships bound for ports around the world. Got to check into it, but maybe more locally made Solo hot cups with petroleum plastic liners are a better embodied energy play, especially if going to the dump anyway.

How many cups??

Please check out the first few minutes of Chris Jordan's TED talk (at least).

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/chris_jordan_pictures_some_shocking_stats.html

Don't Put the Charrette Before the Horse...

Just confirmed that our first meeting around Portland Cup will be all business.

We'll be 'strategizing' on June 4th with local leaders in business and sustainability at Frank Creative in SE PDX. Turns out our hosts at Frank are also very interested in this issue and have graciously offered the use of their deluxe conference room for the gathering.

Our focus for this first meeting will be an overview of the pros and cons of the current single-use cup systems and the benefits of going with a reusable solution.

We'll also try to get a quick and dirty business plan together for how the Portland Cup would make dollars and good sense.

The space for this meeting is very limited, but if you or someone you know would be a perfect fit for this first business strategy meeting, feel free to contact me.

The findings of this meeting will feed subsequent meetings, presentations, and design sessions to follow.

With renewed vigor! Spring helps, I suppose.

(in British accent) RIGHT!

(back to normal) Working at the shop, the coffee roaster datalogging project, keeping up with my daughter Maya, a coffee trip to Ethiopia, and the soul-sucking power of Winter delayed me, but I SHALL TARRY NO LONGER! The Portland Cup Project is "ON, BABY!" (sm Michael Steele).

I had a great conversation in the shop the other day with Sarah "Frances" Michaelson of City Repair, etc renown. She was very encouraging and suggested that "building our base" and getting the word out might be a great next step. To that point, I am going to begin talking to coffee shop owners, baristas, coffee drinkers, designers, elected officials, really anyone who'll listen to me about the idea of a Ubiquitous, Durable, Reusable Cup System for Portland.

I'm going to be hosting a Portland Cup design charrette (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charrette) this Spring/Summer maybe or maybe not in conjunction with the Village Building Convergence (http://vbc.cityrepair.org/). During these sessions, which I'll outline soon, we'll "discover" what the actual Portland Cup will look like and be made of, how the cup distribution/washing/accounting system will work, and how much all of this will cost/save in dollars/trees.

Time to start a Facebook page as well, methinks!

Industrial designers, where you at? Let's build some prototypes.

What we really need now is for some folk with the art, design, engineering skills to flex them. Let's get some beautiful renderings of what you think this cup should look like and how it should function. Use some of my thoughts from my last couple posts, but by no means feel bound by them. Post as comments.

It sounds like a side project, but if I can get a RepRap (http://reprap.org) built relatively quickly and cheaply, that would be an ideal tool to make cup prototypes. I'm trying to coordinate with someone on the Dorkbot PDX site (http://dorkbotpdx.org) to get this going. Then we could 3D print as many trial designs as we like.

Cup Design 101

One of the most exciting design challenges is for the cup itself. What will it look like, what material will it be made of, how will a lid work, etc. Here are some things I think are important.

Cheap: cups must be inexpensive to produce/replace and not something of high value that people will steal/horde

Durable: cups must stand up to 1000's of use, wash cycles

Food safe: this would seem to go without saying, but the endocrine disruptor BPA kept popping up in the last few years in our favorite water bottles. See BPA aside below.

Lid-able: need to be able to put a lid on it. possibly both sipper lid and hole-free lid.

Use-safe: the cups should be thick-walled enough or otherwise designed so you don't burn yourself holding it, you should be able to set it down without it tipping over, you should be able to put it in a cup holder in a car. These relate to two items above.

Right-sized: cups that are too small or too big won't be embraced by businesses or customers.

Stackable: after sanitizing, cups must be drip dried (not wiped) per sanitation code. Racks and racks of cups drying and taking up racks and space would be a pain for either a business washing cups or the central wash. Businesses need to wash cups and immediately put them out for use. Cups (esp. plastic) that fit TOO closely when stacked don't dry and get stinky. Cups should have ribs or other design to maintain a slight gap for drying when stacked. And Portland Cups have got to stack to replace the very stackable and space efficient paper cup. To go on a little tangent, I think that that big stack of paper cups which is so emblematic of a coffee shop, has rooted itself in our minds so that when we think coffee shop, we think of that mountain of former forest. We are comforted by the knowledge that even if we forget our travel mug, the cups will be their waiting for us. I wonder if instead there was a mighty stack of Portland Cups in most every coffee house. Think of the mental map now. Coffee shop -> stacks of durable cups -> I really like my own durable mug, so I think I'll bring it with me today. I predict personal mug use will actually rise with the intro of the Portland Cup simply due to this kind of subtle reminder.

What do I think the above adds up to? Something like this basic plastic tumbler: http://www.arrowplastic.com/store/catalog.asp?item=65

I happen to have several of these at home. I looked at the bottom of the cup and found the manufacturers website. I like the polypropylene (#5 PP) material as it's considered highly food safe, it has a temperature range of something like 0 deg C to 135 deg C (275 deg F). With plastic we could add ribs or something to make stacked drying possible. They would be cheap and yet durable. If made a little thicker than usual, would be extra durable and probably easy on the hands when full of hot stuff (I've tested mine with hot water/coffee and it behaves like a thick paper cup). I would of course add, besides the drying details, screw threads ala mason jar for a screw-on lid. I would in fact use the exact threads that a canning jar uses so that folks that want to can use a solid lid to carry cup by bike etc spill free. Could produce a cheap PP screw on sipper lid. I would put copy on the cup which reads "The Portland Cup", "Not For Resale, For reUse" (kinda cheesy, I know), "http://portlandonline.com/portlandcup". See mockup sketch.

BPA CURRENTS WITH LEX LEXAN

I was really confused about how all of these rigid, clear, often colorful water bottles could be BPA generators one day and BPA-free the next. Especially after reading the wikipedia entry on Polycarbonate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycarbonate) where we learn that #7 PC is made from Bisphenol A and our old friend from WWI, phosgene. Of course you'd get BPA in your H2O every time you used NaOCl (bleach), the bottle is MADE FROM IT. How then could this doomed beverage container material be rendered "BPA-free"? Because it ain't PC anymore, it's TRITAN (http://www.eastman.com/Brands/eastman_tritan/Pages/Overview.aspx). It still may say #7 on the bottle, cuz #7 just means "some plastic other than #1 through #6", but even though this tough, clear material walks like polycarbonate and quacks like polycarbonate, uh...I got nothing, but you get the point.

Starting to Get It

Andrea had some brilliant thoughts on cup pickup, wash, redistribute this eve. I'll try to get them down here.

So we've got businesses using Portland Cups and we've got racks for the cups on top of sorter stations (formerly known as trash cans). Two models for washing the cups, not necessarily mutually exclusive: 1) cups washed by participating/supporting businesses, and 2) cups washed at central wash station run by city/non-profit/etc. In the case of model 1, businesses adopt a rack and wash cups which they then use in their business. Model 2, anybody brings the cups back to a central washing center and then gets paid for doing so. Very similar to Curitiba model of trash for cash/groceries to clean up favelas. Cups are kept out of waste stream because they are valuable. Why have a central facility? We want to reward folks for bringing the cups in for reuse, but we don't want to burden retailers with counting cups and paying collectors as in the bottle return situation.

How does this get funded? Businesses buy use of the cups, of course. Right now businesses pay for paper cups. With this system, when you need cups you either wash cups on your rack or in your bus tubs or you order some from central. Cups you find yourself or are brought to you for free and which you wash yourself are free, but cups that are brought to central, washed, then delivered to your business by couriers, you have to pay for. I imagine that anyone can pick up cups and bring them in to central, but contracted couriers line B-line would deliver them back. We get the win-win of cups getting reused, people making money, businesses saving some money, etc.

See the quick and dirty flow diagram above.

No Cup Logo

Just added a link on http://cellardoorcoffee.com to Portland Cup blog. Thanks to danhannigan@blogspot.com for vector cup used to make graphic.

Article from Mercury on Cup Problem via Heather on Portland Permaculture Guild Listserve

http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/Content?oid=29552&category=34029

great idea!

Here's an article that was in the Portland Mercury several years ago about the huge number of disposable cups used in Portland. It's probably gotten worse since then.

Heather

The Coming Cup-tastrophe

This is the Most Important Article about Paper Cups You Will Ever Read.

By M. William Helfrich

& Justin Wescoat Sanders

Illustrations by Danny Hellman

There are two people writing this story, and we both formerly worked as baristas at a coffee shop called World Cup Coffee and Tea. The shop is in the Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center, aka the Ecotrust Building, aka this environmentally conscious town's most environmentally conscious structure. Its top floor houses Portland's Office of Sustainable Development. Its middle floor bustles with Ecotrust's glut of fishery, forestry, and conservation programs. Its ground floor is lined with progressive, green retail outlets: a Patagonia clothing store, a new-age pharmacy parlor, a Hot Lips Pizza (known for using organic, local ingredients), and World Cup, whose coffee beans are all organic and fair-trade certified.

Every day we worked in this perfect little bubble of green, and every day we watched, with initial surprise, and then frustration, and eventually anger, as the same ugly chunk of dirt slipped through a crack in its otherwise smooth, shiny facade. We watched as people representing every different facet of the environmental groups and businesses around us--from office temps to executive members of Ecotrust, from retail workers to aides in the Office of Sustainable Development--came in daily, twice daily, and even thrice daily, to order their short soy chai lattes, or their cups of black coffee, or their tall white chocolate mochas... and then take them away in paper cups.

Sure, there were those who faithfully brought their own reusable mugs every day, but they were easily outnumbered. And we wondered, mystified, why in this greenest of buildings, where everyone is gathered together under the expressed commonality of being "environmentally friendly," how so many people could neglect taking an extra ten seconds to pick up a commuter mug and bring it to the coffee shop.

And then we thought, well, maybe we're the ones who are ignorant; maybe these environmentalists know something we don't. Maybe in this day and age the blatant wasting of a paper cup is a trivial matter compared to all the earth-saving goodness we practice on a daily basis.

But then we got to thinking about the number of coffee shops in this progressive, java-lovin' town; the Stumptowns and the Fresh Pots, the World Cups and Peets, the Coffee Peoples and Coffee Time and the tons and tons of Starbucks, and every little mom 'n' pop shop on every corner and in every strip-mall. And we thought about all the paper cups flying out of them, with environmentalists and non-environmentalists alike, and we thought, well, maybe, somehow, there's something that they don't know. Or even worse: maybe there's something they do know, and they're still not doing anything about it. Or maybe our angst over paper cup use was little more than a side effect of our self-righteous environmental egomania, i.e. a pet peeve. Either way, it bothered us, and so we decided to find out more.

CUPS KILL... TREES, THAT IS

We began at the beginning: Starbucks, the world's largest purveyor of all things coffee, and a corporation that's allegedly active in waste reduction and promoting commuter mug use. "Since 1994, Starbucks has relied on the Green Team," reads a company memo, "a group of our store partners (employees) in North America, [who] identify opportunities and champion initiatives that help improve the company's environmental performance."

Despite its good intentions, Starbucks' actual environmental statistics tell a slightly different story.

"If only 50 customers a day in every store were to use reusable mugs," continues the Green Team memo, "Starbucks would save 150,000 disposable paper cups daily! This equals 1.7 million pounds of paper, 3.7 million pounds of solid waste, and 150,000 trees a year."

"If only" is a key part of the little factoid. In 2000, according to that same memo, Starbucks estimated their customers actually only saved 3600 trees--a far, far cry from the hoped-for mark. "If only" 50 customers a day in every Starbucks store did use commuter mugs but they clearly don't. In fact, if you spread 3600 trees per year saved across all of Starbucks' 6500 stores worldwide, it's really only about ONE customer per day for each Starbucks store who's using a commuter mug, which means the rest of the 49 are using paper cups. And the painful truth is, the average Starbucks does many times more than 50 customers a day, if not an hour.

Starbucks will not release the actual amount of paper cups its stores use for competitive reasons, but based on these statistics, it's abundantly clear that 150,000 trees per year used/wasted on paper cups is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Green Team memo also mentions that the 3600 trees saved in 2000 were saved by customers "using their commuter mugs more than 13 million times." For a little update on that statistic we consulted the Starbucks website, which neglects to say how many trees were killed in 2002, but does mention its customers used their mugs an estimated 12.7 million times, or 0.3 million less than in 2000. We're not mathematicians, but it doesn't take Albert Einstein to figure out that if less customers are using reusable mugs, less trees are being saved to boot.

And let's not forget there are at LEAST as many NON-Starbucks coffee shops in the world who are also going through tons of paper cups a day. And then there are the paper cups coming out of fast food restaurants worldwide, which is probably a number too terrifying to comprehend, but also for a different story. For this story is about the Starbucks coffee culture, a culture that probably isn't even surprised by these scary statistics and cryptic speculations, because it's a culture informed about the environment, which has been trained to think about the consequences of its actions.

But this culture also continues to indulge in paper cups, a significantly destructive pursuit that would be easily remedied with the use of a simple commuter mug. Perhaps using a mug to "save the earth" is just too abstract for most people; after all, if you can't witness the impact of your actions, how do you know they're having any impact at all? Perhaps we need to look at things from a level anyone can understand, which is to say money.

LET'S GET DOWN TO BUSINESS

Paper cup excess in Portland becomes even more mystifying from a business angle. Dan Welch, the owner of World Cup Coffee, informed us that the average 16-ounce paper cup, replete with cardboard sleeve, store artwork, plastic lid, and stir stick, costs 22 cents to produce. This means if a store does, say, 200 customers a day (and a successful, busy coffee shop will do several times that), they will blow $44 on cups alone, or approximately the wages of a single $7.50-per-hour barista working a standard six- to eight-hour shift with a lunch break. So, the less coffee shops spend on paper cups, the more they can pay their employees. Where else can this phenomenon extend? How about every fast food restaurant in America? How much more money could we give all those poor bastards steaming in McDonald's kitchens by just making a few take-out trays reusable?

But let's keep it simple. Why aren't more coffee shops promoting commuter mugs? Larger chains like Starbucks actively promote their mugs, and give discounts for mug use, but the trend is still notably absent from many smaller shops. In addition to saving money on cups and being able to pay their employees more (or spending the money on less altruistic things, which is their prerogative--the point is, they HAVE the money) shop owners would also be making money on merchandise, as mugs can range in price anywhere from five to $20. One mug sold can make back the price of almost 100 paper cups.

What's more, when we talk paper cup expense, we're really only talking raw materials. As Steve Apotheker, a Senior Analyst in Metro's office of Solid Waste and Recycling says, "The cost of one paper cup totally misses the true cost to the business of the labor involved, and the gas involved in moving these cups around." Or how about the cost of disposing the cups? According to Bruce Walker, Sustainable Development's Solid Waste & Recycling Program Manager, "What we know from looking at the concrete garbage cans that are out on public streets is that a lot of the waste in them is either coffee cups or the plastic containers people get for takeout food... Our office spends over $200,000 a year for pick-up of these trashcans. We'd rather not do that."

Walker goes on to say that Sustainable Development charges the hauling company that transports public trash to landfills, which in turn charges the businesses in the neighborhoods where the cans reside.

"Essentially, all Portland businesses are paying for the collection of a lot of coffee cups, whether it's a coffee shop or an auto shop," says Walker, ruefully. "The auto repair places probably aren't generating a lot of garbage that's being put in those cans."

Of course, the 210,000 smackers businesses pay for the public cans is a drop in the bucket compared to what they pay for having their privately accumulated trash carted away.

"Businesses all have their own trash, and they pay their hauler directly for that," says Walker. "And in those charges there's a small amount that comes to the city, and we in turn spend it on recycling programs and everything else we work with the business community on."

THE QUICK FIX

Both the Office of Sustainable Development and Metro deal with the programs Walker is referring to--OSD at the city level and Metro at the regional level. Currently, both groups are in the process of developing an ambitious citywide composting system. The program would be designed to compost food from restaurants, but could also include paper cups.

Steve Apotheker explains, "Because the City of Portland has banned the use of [Styrofoam] cups, you can only use paper, at least in the Portland area. It may be possible, as this program starts, for coffee shops that want to recycle scraps, coffee grounds, and paper cups--if they come up with a way to keep them segregated from plastic lids and straws--to compost this material."

So is this a solution for the problem of paper cups? Apotheker says, "I'm not advocating this as the dream strategy, because it's a huge waste of energy, mostly fossil fuel, that has gone into making a paper cup." But he adds, "Composting is better than disposal."

Both Steve Apotheker and Bruce Walker and those they work with would rather that cups not be composted at all.

"You could reduce the number of [trash] collections if [cups] were simply crushed," says Walker, "or better yet if they just weren't there in the first place."

On that end, Dan Blue of Community Environmental Services, a research and service unit of the College of Urban and Public Affairs at PSU, has recently performed some experiments. His group placed a large display in a Seattle's Best on campus encouraging commuter mugs by pointing out the wasteful alternative. After the display was up for a week, they went back to find that instead of the average sale of eight mugs, that week the shop sold 30 mugs. Blue says, "I think there is a lot of opportunity to change public perception [about reusable mugs]."

Those involved in setting up these programs are optimistic they'll eventually change the tide of public behavior. The success of the campaign to convince people to recycle was due to showing people that it takes such minimal effort on their part. Nowadays, putting something in the recycling bin is as easy as putting something in a trashcan. But can reducing coffee cup waste ever become that convenient?

Blue says, "Switching to a reusable mug carries with it the perception that it's inconvenient only because it is different than the norm. Change is scary to people and in most cases folks will go with what they are used to."

But once commuter mugs become the norm, argues Walker, it's no big deal.

"I mean, sometimes you're going to be out and not have a mug with you," he explains, "but if you have one in your car/bike/office, it becomes part of your normal routine."

STICK IT TO THE SPOTTED OWL

It's possible that none of this has convinced you. Maybe by this point you even despise the self-importance that people like us feel from using our own mugs, and feel uncomfortable with the idea of changing minute daily habits for the sake of something as abstract as "saving the environment." Fortunately, there's even a logic for people like you. Just keep in mind what Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel wrote in a recent article: "Our strongest arguments for a healthy environment are selfish: we want it for ourselves, not for threatened species like snail darters, spotted owls, and Furbish louseworts."

So you see, it's not for the Earth and its creatures that you'll want to do this, but for you, for human survival. YOU are your own best reason to use reusable mugs. The next time you're in line at Starbucks, and they say, "Will you have that for here or to go," give a big fuck you to the Furbish louseworts, and ask for it in a mug.

And while you're at it, stick it to the spotted owl, and have your pastry on a ceramic plate.

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 12:13 PM, roaster@cellardoorcoffee.com <cellardoorcoffee@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi All,
We've been roasting and selling coffee here in town for almost 4
years (http://www.cellardoorcoffee.com) and I can't stand the paper
cup waste any more. I've been talking about the idea of a city-wide
deployment of a durable cup system which is the result of an open
collaborative design process. Please join in and tell a friend.
http://portlandcup.blogspot.com

Thanks,
Jeremy Adams
Cellar Door Coffee Roasters
Twitter: @cellardoorpdx

Portland Permaculture Guild
Meets the 3rd Monday of every month.
*** www.pdxpermaculture.org ***

Starbucks Analysis

Just found this and need to study it, but wanted to put it out here. Lot's of interesting info on this site. Not sure of political leanings yet.

http://www.edf.org/documents/523_starbucks.pdf

Compost Wars and Questions to Be Answered

About a year ago I remember a rep from a producer of compostable corn plastic service ware came to visit me at the shop. I told him that our business participated in the Portland compost program and that I was having a hard time figuring out if his company's products were acceptable to the compost facility, Cedar Grove. I'd used some of his products at a previous job and his were the only compostable/biodegradable trash bags my paper distributor carried. He assured me that their products were completely compostable, but that Cedar Grove just wanted to them to pay an outrageous fee for certification of each of their products. Since they produced everything from forks to clam shells to trash bags, the thousands and thousands of dollars for all of this testing effectively excluded them from participation. Sounded like a classic David and Goliath. To circumvent this injustice, his company planned their own composting facilities on the outskirts of Portland. Sure all of the corn to make their products came from China, but ocean shipping is the most efficient form of transport, he said. The guy at the paper company assured me that even though the bags weren't technically certified, they composted just fine and were far cheaper than the "approved" ones. Seemed like confirmation that you had to grease the right palms to play in this hot "green" market.

I felt a little better about using his trash bags until one day I got a memo from the composting facility stating that if I continued using the same bags, my compostables would be diverted to landfill because the bags didn't break down fast enough and thus compost made with them in the mix had lots of ripped up plastic included. Not the sort of thing you want when you're trying to sell the finished product as a premium soil amendment. So what was the deal! I'm paying extra for compost service and don't want my coffee grounds and veggie scraps sent to landfill. I forwarded the memo to my paper company and started poking around.

It turned out that the standard laid out in ASTM D6400 was what set the bar for "compostable" products of the kind my composter wanted. 6400 was an industry standard and not some arbitrary rule set up to exclude the little guys. It however did exlude many of the products that the maker of my bags produced. I recently went to their website to check out their current claims. Now they only say that their main line consists of "biodegradable" products instead of "compostable" ones. They even have a few disclaimers that their main products don't meet the ASTM D6400 standard (they have a couple of other small lines under different names that do, it seems). Still, they also advertise how they helped out a NW restaurant chain to "go green" by replacing 16 pieces of service ware with their "biodegradable" products. They claim that food on their plates will be wholesome while food served on petroleum-based ware will be tainted with poisons, and that their biodegradable products will make a difference by breaking down to benign components in the landfills. Thing is, I would think that what you get from anaerobic landfill breakdown is the potent greenhouse gas methane! Of course I'd guess most of the 6400-compliant compostable cups end up making methane in the landfill too. Especially since compost cans are basically non-existent on the streets.

All of this raised more questions than I had answers for. I still need to find some for these:

1) I assume that it's better to compost a cup than to put a compostable or biodegradable cup into the landfill. Of course the haulers still have to move my compostable cup to the compost facility which uses petrol (looks like 2 hours and 45 minutes away from me!! CLICK HERE FOR MAP), and their the machinery to help turn the compost uses more energy. What's the total energy when you consider how the corn for the PLA corn plastic is grown in China, shipped here (as plastic stock already?), turned into products, shipped around the country, used, hauled away and composted, and the finished compost hauled to point of use. All of that versus the garbage chain for a basic paper cup for petrol lining that goes into the landfill (versus compostable cup in landfill). And those two versus a reusable durable cup.

2) I've heard that the Cedar Grove facility is already almost maxed out and that it may become harder to enter Portland compost program. I need to fact check that.

3) Is number 2 the reason we don't have compost cans or sorters with compostables/recyclables/landfill everywhere? I suspect that reusable durable cups will be WAY better from an energy and resource impact perspective than compostables, but we need to check that out. If compostables are the way to go, lets get more collection facilities. Seattle already collects foods scraps and compostable wares at home green cans (http://www.seattle.gov/util/Services/Yard/Yard_Waste_Collection/WhatsAccepted/index.htm). Can they do it because the compostig facility is so close by? Why don't we get one going? What's Portland waiting for???

4) Is any other city doing this already? I tried to google for Curitiba, Brazil and reusable cups, but nothing came up. If not, why not? What am I missing? Interesting to see what did come up though. Dart, the maker of cups including styrofoam still, has a study that says disposables are often just as good as reusables if you take the dishwashing into account: http://www.dartcontainer.com/web/environ.nsf/files/ILEA.pdf/$FILE/ILEA.pdf

Starbucks has its analysis about ceramic and glass cups here: http://innovation.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=30802

And the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison has the closest thing to the Portland Cup I've heard of so far, though it was going on in 2004, so who knows if it's still active: http://www.edf.org/article.cfm?contentid=2197

Plastic Beers Mugs, a Look to Europe, and Terrible Cups

I was looking at all of the mugs, cups, and glasses in my cupboard again and realized that something like the mug I got at the last Oregon Brewers Fest might be a good starting point. Not a real looker, but lightweight, with a handle, not very stackable, but polypropylene (PP) construction. PP (plastic symbol #5) is widely used for food-grade plastic (no BPA). It withstands hot and cold liquids, but we'd have to see how it holds up against coffee/tea. Quite well I'd wager. I'll bring it to the cafe tomorrow. Here's a website with mugs similar to mine:
http://www.timberwolfplastics.com/stein-mugs.htm

Seems we could add male screw lid threads to top and different lids could be used. Would people carry lids around? Anyhow, add another set of threads to bottom (kinda dirty maybe) or side (branch-like growth) for screw-on lid storage?

This reminded me of reusable cup systems for events like football matches and music concerts in Europe I'd stumbled across when surfing the web before. In these systems you pay a deposit for your cup at the bar and bring it back for an exchange cup when you want a refill. If you want the cup as a souvenir, take it home, otherwise turn it in for a refund of your deposit. Do we have this at Blazers games and such now?

http://www.icupco.com/
Click on the environmental facts link to get this stat which I haven't fact checked: "North America consumes 50 million trees a year to make paper cups".
I'm guessing Forest Park has 1-2 million trees?

http://www.cup-service.net/cups-vending/plastic-cups-with-rim/

Most of these systems use a PP tumbler without a handle for ease of stacking. Many of the designs have a thicker portion at the top so they can be held comfortably when filled with hot beverages. One system says they get about 100 uses from each cup. Perhaps a more rugged design could get 3-5 times as many uses. Gotta figure out how many uses we NEED to get out of each mug.

If a stackable design like this could work (with screw lid top also or other lid affix point) it could easily replace the stack of paper cups currently sitting next to our airpot.

I'm thinking that the next step for our shop, is to stop buying "eco" compostable cups with "King Corn" PLA lining (we started with these cups when we did farmers markets only and could recapture a decent percentage of cups and send them to Cedar Grove via Portland Composting, but now most all of the cups go right into the landfill), replace them with commodity white paper cups with dinosaur lining, and put up a sign that says, "Ask Us About Our Terrible Cups". Guaranteed to break the ice at parties. The $30 per 1000 case we save on cups and the $20 per 1000 case we save on lids will give us some cashflow for the Portland Cup project. Yippee!

Breakfast meeting

We're having an impromptu breakfast meeting on Portland Cup ideas. Here we go with a list of sorts.

Open Cup specification will spur cottage industries or full-blown business ventures of cup accessories. CAD files are available so if you want to make a special lid that seals so you can throw The Cup in your bike bag, go for it.

It's okay if Portland Cups leave PDX because they will be great marketing for the City of Portland. Every Cup display could have a collection box so that out-of-towners could buy their Cups as a souvenir on the honor system and take it home. The Cups could bear a PDX portal web address. Travel Portland will surely be into it: http://www.travelportland.com/

Cups could be branded with supporters logos and such. I'm pretty strongly opposed to this. The Cup should be a Portland Cup, not a "Coffee Shop Business Association Cup" or a "Big Box Store, Inc. Cup". The Cup should be uniform and ubiquitous, not produced in limited editions which would promote leakage to collectors.

Cup redistribution could be done by the fleet of bicycle and trailer equipped people who currently cruise for bottles and cans for recycling. Safe delivery of cups would be worth cash money.

Clean Cups could be issued with a modest deposit, 10 cents or so which could be claimed by those returning them to participating wash site. I don't think this would be a good idea, because it would place an accounting and cash flow burden on businesses (retailers hate having to deal with bottle/can return) and would make The Cup less a basic right of Portland citizenship.

The Cups are returned to business's bus tubs or to racks adopted by businesses with dishwashers. The racks should be on top of the redesigned compost/recycle/landfill sorter centers that will replace current trash cans. We need folks to design the racks and sorter centers.

Need to interface with farmers market Durable Dish program folks. http://www.montavillamarket.org/dish.html
recycle@montavillamarket.org


Need to interface with Metro.

Need to interface with Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability.
http://www.portlandonline.com/bps/

More to follow....

Tell a friend...

Let it begin

There's an idea that I've been kicking around for a while now. I've given the pitch to a number of family, friends, and customers, and now it's time to go public and invite your to get involved.

Today in Portland, Oregon, scores of people went into their local coffee shop, kicked themselves for not bringing their travel mug, filled up a paper cup and tossed it in a trash can shortly after draining its contents.

All day long at my coffee shop people tell me how many travel mugs they have at home or in the other car or at the office, but somehow they forgot to bring one in today. The fact is that most people either don't bring a cup because they don't want to carry a cup everywhere, or they simply forget to bring it. People mean well but fail on the execution most of the time. Maybe that giant tower of paper cups that greets you whenever you enter a coffeehouse has conditioned us to think a paper cup is a more "normal" container to use when taking coffee to go. Maybe we don't need to change the behavior of the cup user, but rather the cup users' environment.

Some tomorrow soon in Portland, Oregon, people will enter their local coffee shop, fill up a durable Portland Cup and walk on without a care.

Maybe they'll finish their coffee 5 blocks later and put the Portland Cup on one of the racks that tops the ubiquitous compostables/recyclables/landfill sorter centers that stand where garbage cans once were. Or perhaps they'll take The Cup home, wash it, and use it there for a while, before leaving home one day with The Cup full of tea. Tea now gone, The Cup is returned to a convenient rack which is looked after by the deli it lives in front of. The deli staff wash the cups in their sanitizing dishwasher and use them for carryout beverages and soups. When too many cups collect in an area, they are redistributed by box-bike courier or along existing redistribution routes servicing the libraries or school cafeterias.

But what does this Portland Cup look like? Does it have a lid? Will it fit in my car's cup holder? Do you have to show an ID card with a Portland address to use one? Can I buy one? Won't they just get stolen like the Yellow Bikes? Could this really work? What will the paper companies say? Will the specification be "open"? Can I make and profit from accessories for The Cup?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions, but I'm sure WE, the citizens of Portland, do.

I've been slinging coffee for a while now and I'm done with seeing bag after bag of paper cups and plastic lids get hauled out to the dumpster behind some coffee mega chain from the trash cans INSIDE the cafe! Imagine how many more of those cups and lids are tossed further afield. Compostable cups and lids could be an answer, but right now the vast majority of cups that COULD be composted, go right into the landfill. Plus it's always better to REUSE, isn't it?

I'm convinced that if we harness the creativity of all of our underemployed designers, artists, craftspeople, scientists, engineers, along with urban planners, city government, local businesses, and all of the cup users out there--which is EVERYBODY--we'll be able to create a system that works for us Portlanders and will be a great model for other communities.

Let's get started.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

– R. Buckminster Fuller