No need to toss coffee cups

Local cafés offer reusable mugs

By Becca Cuniff

The Sandy Post, Jul 2, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

Reusable cups such as this one from Starbucks helps cut down on trash created by throwing drink cups away day after day.

marcus hathcock / sandy post

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You can drink organic, shade grown, fair trade coffee, but if you’re throwing away a cup of day, your coffee habit still hurts the environment.

According to the 2008 edition of the Coffee Statistics Report, people around the world consume more than 400 billion cups of coffee every year.

Easily the world’s second most popular drink – water wins hands-down – espresso’s wave of popularity has had an adverse side effect on the environment. A press release by Tully’s Coffee Company in 2007 reports that Americans send 16 billion plastic disposable cups to landfills every year.

Those cups cannot be recycled because of the plastic coating on them, designed to help beverages maintain their temperatures and keep from leaking.

In an effort to lessen their environmental impact, many coffee shops now sell reusable coffee cups, will refill personal cups and even offer a discount to encourage a greener approach to caffeine ingestion.

Plastic cups can have a devastating effect on the environment and use several precious resources to produce them. When the type of plastic that keeps disposable cups from leaking begins to decompose, it releases methane, a type of gas that has 23 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide.

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