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.”
In my small home town of Trinidad, CA, the only coffee shop refuses to carry any disposable paper products whatsoever. People are given a mug that carries with it a 50 cent deposit (or maybe a dollar) and most people return the mug.
ReplyDeleteThis particular coffee shop is similar to Cellar Door, in that it has a large number of regular customers. The business, therefore, can (at least partly) support this rather utopian scheme because so many the customers go there each day and wouldn't dream of "stealing" the mug. I would imagine that for customers that are just passing through, this idea would seem less pleasant, but perhaps these customers would realize that they aren't in as big of a hurry as they thought they were, and that they can actually just sit in the shop.
If you told enough people that you didn't do "to -go's" maybe more people would bring mugs, maybe they would sit and drink coffee, maybe they would pay a deposit on a mug, but maybe, just maybe, they would stop coming.
I think a mug deposit scheme would work Cellar Door. As a matter of fact, I would imaging it would be just one more thing to further endear our customers to us and would increase business. If people love our tab board they would love being loaned one of our mugs.
That said, I doubt it would make any money ( not that that is necessarily important) and I think it would fall apart as a city wide venture.
Mugs are fairly cheap at goodwill, but they are still more expensive that a possible deposit and I would imagine a large portion of the mugs would never be seen again. Especially if it was some sort of "ironic" mug and some 8oz latte drinking hipster felt like he was getting a deal on a new fashion accessory.
And on the city level, I think the system would become so disorganized and messy that it would quickly be abandoned.
But I agree, we better get started on some new plan. Maybe if we pioneer mug lending at our own expense, more cafe's will follow and a bigger system can develope....