Hacker News Reader

Comment by pg_bot | Hacker News Reader

If you don't think the people who work at these companies care about making better cups, read the following article.[0] There is a big opportunity for making a better disposable cup, but there are many engineering hurdles to jump over.

- The cup has to retail for 17 cents.

- It has to support a lid that is resealable.

- It has to tip over and not spill.

- It has to handle high temperatures.

- It can't alter the taste of the liquid inside.

- It has to be biodegradable.

- It can't catastrophically fail if the liquid is left inside for too long.

Seems like a tough challenge to me.

[0]: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/315159

View on HN

It's worth pointing out that the obvious alternative, reusable to-go cups, need to solve an additional set of challenges:

- Must NOT violate sanitization of the work area; cups provided by customers should not pose any health risks to workers or other customers.

- Should be durable enough to survive repeated visits

- Either the reusable cup must conform to a standard size, baristas need a way to measure liquids consistently without in-cup guides, or coffee could be sold by volume...

- Reusable cups should not introduce enough delay to appreciably disrupt the flow of customers

Disposable cups have the great advantage of being standardized by the company and solve a lot of these problems, especially the health problems. This is just off the top of my head, I'm sure I'm missing some other great points. This is a much harder problem than it appears on the surface; the devil's in the details.

How big a deal could the sanitization thing really be? Every coffee shop I've been to, including Starbucks, will fill pretty much any cup you give them. The only rule I'm aware of is that they're not supposed to handle the lids.

Apropos nothing much, my brother owns a coffee shop in suburban Chicago, and their clientele is mostly local; they have a whole collection of old mugs, which they let customers take with them and return later.

You shouldn’t be downvoted for this, you’re absolutely correct about bringing your own cups.

Thanks!

A bit of friendly advice: voting on HN is a stochastic process, and by the time I saw this comment, it had already been upvoted many times. This is one of the reasons the guidelines ask not to comment on voting (but not the most important reason).

I have trouble with this too! A sort-of-obvious trick: instead of discussing whether something should be downvoted, say you upvoted it and why. "I upvoted this, because every cafe I've visited fills third party cups too" says the same thing without litigating the vote, and also emphasizes the new information you're adding.

SNOOT MODE OFF!

I would be wary of selection bias in the people who already use reusable containers. They might be more diligent in their sanitation than a larger population would be. Anyone in the food service business that is good, cares deeply about health inspections.

I can foresee some problems with the plan. For example, you might get higher turnover because staff members are sick of cleaning dirty cups. It might take longer to serve each customer which would usually leads to less business. People who aren't aware that they need to bring a cup might leave empty handed and never return. It might be easy to do the occasional mug, but at lunch rush with a line of people it may be a different story.

I would be highly interested in seeing the results of an experiment where a shop only used reusable cups. I think it might surface problems that you might not think of. Not to say that it couldn't be solvable.

Back under Advanced Socialism, we had public soda machines with public glasses which you had to wash yourself at the machine. We did not die out of glass-borne communicable diseases. I don't think the hygiene (or cup management) problem is quite as severe as you suspect it is.

https://i.imgur.com/TIhqyIh.jpg

Lest you think I'm some sort of madman, I suspect the hygiene problem is quite mild. But speaking as someone who has washed dishes for a living, people can be quite disgusting with their food and that does get to you.

Having an attitude where you say "why don't they just do this" is typically not helpful. People are smart, they probably have already considered your solutions. If someone doesn't do something the way you think it should be done it doesn't make them stupid. Trying to figure out what you are missing when a solution seems obvious is a helpful way to see the world.

Die no, but everybody had an H. pylori infection

Once again, you are absolutely right. I just reviewed the guidelines again, but thank you for the reminder.

I bought mulled red wine (gluewine sp?) in a christmas market in Germany this last winter. They sell you a proper coffee-type-mug to drink it from, for 6 euros (about US$7), which you can return when you're done and they'll refund you.

I kept mine, it's a nice souvenir of Cologne and I drink my coffee from it every morning :)

If you had to pay, say $10 for a proper coffee mug to have your take-away coffee in, but they'd buy back those same coffee mugs for the same price, that would probably solve the problem.

Spelling: Glühwein.

There is a catch though. Those mugs either stay near the stand they were sold from, or are taken as souvenirs. This works just fine.

With buying coffee on the go, people would take their mug along with them to wherever they are going, and you would have to hand it back the next time you visited that particular coffee shop or one of the same franchise. The risk of the mug getting damaged is much higher, and it is not nearly as convenient to carry a dirty mug around as it is to dispose of a used paper cup.

A lot would have to chance for such a system to work. Customer mentalities being one aspect.

Kind of what https://recup.de/ is trying to solve I guess?

I have zero data on this, but I'll lay decent money that 90% of take-out coffee customers go to the same shop regularly.

After all, they're going somewhere, probably somewhere local, with their coffee. If they weren't, they'd stay at the coffee shop to drink their coffee. Or if they're not going somewhere local, then they're on a long journey (not that common).

I used to drink most take-out coffee when I worked just around the corner from the coffee stand, and went there every day, twice a day, for decent coffee.

They most of the time dont actually sell those mugs, the 6€ are a deposit.

Depends where exactly you are, I'd wager 50% of them are currently officially "take it as deposit or as buying" because they're often styled for the specific christmas market and vary from year to year. Not sure why people would collect those, but to each their own.

Yeah, but the deposit is higher than the retail price.

that's the right price to set it at... just more expensive that it would cost to buy the mug from a mug store rather than a coffee store.

Re sp: Glühwein.

From what I've read the reusables have to be used ~70 times to be more environmentally friendly than the current disposables.

I think the easiest win would be designating between sit down and take out customers. Sit down customers could be given porcelain or some other washable container. However this would increase labor costs for businesses so you don't automatically get a free win.

This stat gets thrown around for a lot of different kinds of reusable products but what no one ever mentions is what does environmentally friendly actually mean.

When I have looked it up its always simply looking at energy usage to produce the product when by far the biggest impact of our throwaway products is that they end up blowing around the streets or they fall in to the ocean. And even if you do put them in the recycling bin they mostly end up shipped to the 3rd world to be burned or thrown in the ocean.

Also even just looking about the energy usage, 70 times is quite low. A proper coffee cup lasts a lot longer than 70 uses. Really they don't ever break unless dropped.

Depends on the ratio of one-time customers to regular customers.

I go to a coffee shop maybe once a year - perhaps I'm running late and didn't have time to make coffee at home, or I'm out with friends and they spontaneously suggest getting coffee.

Needless to say, I've never had a reusable mug with me in such circumstances! So customers with behaviour like mine are going to be getting a new mug every time, or not patronising coffee shops.

If one in every 70 customers is someone like me, switching to a 70-use-to-break-even cup would be a net loss for the environment even if you get 100% reuse among regular coffee shop patrons.

I have a few reusable, resealable glass coffee cups, and I don’t know that I got 70 uses out of them before I dropped one as I was washing it and it shattered. I’ll be buying plastic reusable cups next time, even though they’re not as nice to use, because for someone as clumsy as me, the risk of breaking a glass object that needs to be hand-washed regularly and is intended to be used while moving around is quite high.

Stainless steel is ideal. Wide mouth Rtic or similar is easy to hand clean if you don't have a dishwasher.

> reusables have to be used ~70 times to be more environmentally friendly than the current disposables

Another commenter linked to a research paper [1] that includes this number. It's worth noting a few things:

* This was comparing ceramic mugs versus disposable cups. They assumed that reusable plastic cups would be more favorable (but did not opine on travel mugs, which are the more reasonable substitute among to-go customers).

* The study was done by Starbucks, among other organizations (may have a bias to make disposable paper look not-so-bad).

* Another study apparently showed 1,000 use threshold, but the author of the below-linked paper considered that study to insufficiently account for all of the costs of paper cups (deforestation, etc.).

full text:

* There has been a long-standing debate over the comparative energy-efficiencies of disposable products and reusable dishware. A study that is frequently cited is one conducted by Martin Hocking, a professor at The University of Victoria in British Columbia. Hocking (1994) reports that one would have to use a reusable cup as much as 1,000 times in order to justify the higher energy requirement during production. Yet this study omits the impacts of deforestation, transportation, packaging, and disposal; a more complete picture is needed to truly debate the environmental costs of disposable versus reusable cups. Starbucks teamed up with the Alliance for Environmental Innovation to more accurately compare the two, naming reusable products the more environmentally-friendly option (Alliance for Environmental Innovation, 2000). Their study found that using ceramic mugs in place of disposable cups would reduce resource consumption and pollution to an astounding extent, even including the impacts of manufacturing, use, and dishwashing.*

1: http://www.recyclingadvocates.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03...

70 times seems big until you consider that it's just over two months, or 3.5 months if you only consider weekdays. I have a travel mug (Zojirushi, highly recommend!) that I've used for 3 years and it's still in like-new condition, and a Camelbak water bottle that's over 4 years old and still fine.

Using disposable cups just needs to cost more and that needs to be obvious to the consumer. My local Aldi solved it - even though paper bags are only 5¢, everyone brings their own reusable bag.

Plenty of cafés already have coffee mugs and glasses. I’m drinking a cup of coffee from a Homer Laughlin mug warmed atop the espresso machine at a small mom and pop establishment right now. When I’m done with it, it will go into a bus bin a few feet away and washed by the staff here whenever they’re not too busy to do a load of dishes.

If I had brought my own cup, it would have been a 10¢ discount but to be honest, their mugs are better than mine.

Surely the 10¢ discount should be for the people who _don't_ bring their own cup.

But since it's a small shop I assume the 10¢ "fee" is to subsidise the dishwashing labour.

The idea is you’re not paying for the takeaway cup, lid and (usually) sleeve, and you’re not using a store provided cup either.

I’ve been searching for this data for a while. Mind sharing your sources?

http://www.recyclingadvocates.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03...

> From what I've read the reusables have to be used ~70 > times to be more environmentally friendly than the current > disposables.

Is this assuming it goes into landfill afterwards? Does it look better if you use something more easily recyclable?

I think metal is a pretty good candidate: you can get it pretty thin, it's durable, keeps the coffee hot, light and easily cleaned. You just need to ensure that customers are not burning fingers or lips on the containers.

> However this would increase labor costs for businesses so > you don't automatically get a free win.

I think you could probably build relatively low cost cup washing machines, especially as you control the shape of the cup itself.

> Is this assuming it goes into landfill afterwards? Does it look better if you use something more easily recyclable?

Yes, it does, and yes it does. However, getting the waste to the right place is also problematic. According to BBC[0] despite the fact that the cups are technically recyclable, lamost all of them end up in landfill anyway.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-43739043

That and a lot of recyclable material ends up pilled up, with China almost completely refusing to accept it for processing.

How about that corrugated cardboard heat protector for the reusable metal cup?

I think combined with reusable metal cups, it could help.

I was thinking about that, but I'm not sure cardboard is a very high grade recyclable (materials made from it tend to be low quality). I was trying to think of something that itself could be more easily reused, like wood (although manufacturing would be awful).

"I think the easiest win would be designating between sit down and take out customers. Sit down customers could be given porcelain or some other washable container."

Interesting, what country are you from that doesn't do this? I can't think of a coffee place I've been to that doesn't, in Australia and Europe. Even McDonald's has porcelain cups for sit down customers.

At least in all the Starbucks shops I've visited in the United States so far, the common practice is for all coffee to be served in to-go containers. There's no eating in distinction, and while the shops sell (and accept) reusable cups, that isn't the default. If you eat in, and don't bring your own cup, you're served coffee in a disposable container.

Yes, that’s very often the case in Europe (sometimes there’s no choice at train stations and airports) but I haven’t seen that in US.

Some coffee shops in Korea now enforce this rule. If you are staying in the coffee shop to drink your coffee, you are given porcelain cups. If you ask for a disposable cup, you are told that you may not drink your coffee in the coffee shop, there may be some legal reason for it.

most places seem to offer ceramic for sit-down customers? I mean, maybe not starbucks; most Starbucks I've been in don't really seem to have much of a sit-down area, so "for here or to go" isn't really a question. But most nicer places have them; it seems to go with having seating.

I personally have a strong preference for ceramic (not enough to carry my own, but when I'm going to be in a place, I ask for a ceramic cup, simply because it is a more pleasurable experience than a to go cup)

In Europe almost all Starbucks locations have ceramic mugs. The only exceptions I’ve come across are at train stations and airports.

Seems like some sort of deposit system might work. First time, customer buys an inexpensive but reusable cup, which they can take with them. On a following visit, customer exchanges this cup for a clean one, which they can also keep or trade in on a subsequent visit. The retailer would have to wash the cups but at least that would solve the sanitation and consistent serving size issues. After too much wear and tear the cups would eventually need to be recycled, but that cost should be relatively predictable and amortizable, especially at scale.

You've just described my company, https://RECUP.de – it's working very well. Cup deposit is €1, and you can return your cup all over Germany at participating coffee shops and bakeries. At the moment we're at 2500 locations and growing steadily. The system is financed by a daily fee paid by the participating stores, €1 per day per location.

Source: I'm one of the co-founders and CTO. :)

Needs to be asynchronous. You pay for the cup when you buy a drink and you can drop it off at any disposal machine and get your money for the cup back. The problem to solve is that no one wants to carry a cup around for longer than necessary. Buy, drink, dispose.

The government could help a lot by creating a standard cup and mandating all companies have to use them.

> The problem to solve is that no one wants to carry a cup around for longer than necessary. Buy, drink, dispose.

This is a cultural problem. Women carry around handbags that are jammed to the brim with junk. Men don't generally carry handbags at all. There is no place to put a cup.

In Japan there are virtually no trashcans and people are culturally taught not to litter, so everybody has to carry their trash home with them. There is even a movement to disallow workers from using trash bins at work! When I worked at the local high school, I was forced to take all my trash home at the end of each day.

In that kind of environment, you naturally start to carry bags to store stuff until you can get home. Now I have a handbag that I carry with me everywhere. Usually it contains my wallet, my cell phone, a cloth shopping bag and any garbage I happen to have. It's pretty normal here, I think. If reusable drink containers were available, I don't think it would be long until all bags had "cup holders" in them.

But first you need to have a "take your trash home" culture. It's taken Japan decades to make that work. It's not impossible, but it takes time.

Yet Japan is possibly the worst in the world when it comes to plastic waste. They often divide every 2 items from the convenience store into separate bags. Hell, it’s the land of individually plastic wrapped bite sized cookies served in an oversized plastic tray inside a bag with box outside of it.

As an even worse real life example, if you buy a slice of cake and tell them you’ll be eating it in 5 minutes, they get out a laminated box for a slice that can be eaten in 2 bites, insert a plastic ice pack, wrap the box in a tight layer of plastic, tape it, then put that inside a plastic bag large and sturdy enough to carry 2 toddlers. Just for a slice of cake I’ll eat almost immediately. Explain to them you don’t need it, and they can’t comprehend that you’d eat 5 minute warmed cake and do it anyways.

America at least has reusable water bottles and fountains for them in many places. I’ve yet to see such a thing in Japan. People would probably not want to use it because they’d fear it’s unsanitary. Except for some EU countries, America is way ahead of the curve here.

Yep. No argument here. It's all cultural :-P The silliest thing is that plastic bags are not offered in most grocery stores now, but if you pull out your cloth bag in a combini it's a revelation :-) I'm well known in my town for being the foreigner who uses his cloth bag in the combini. Honestly, I'm certain people have them, but they are too embarrassed to use them! I keep using mine in hopes that someone else will follow suit, but it hasn't happened yet. Some day everyone will switch and it will be "Well, of course. It's obvious", but until that day, nobody will...

Yes it is a cultural problem and as we all know they are the hardest to overcome. If we want to make headway we need to start somewhere else and work on culture in the background. In Germany the pfand system has been working well for years. In Berlin you leave your bottle on the side walk and someone who needs the money can collect it to return it. It's a small act of charity that people regularly engage in. I believe it's the same in NYC from what I saw when visiting?

Didn't we already solve this with recyclable glass and deposits? Beer bottles at least have worked this way my whole life.

Yeah, but you don’t drink a beer on a train in the morning or during a lunchtime walk.

Plot twist: the glass is just crushed and dumped, very little actually gets recycled. Everyone uses different glass for their bottles and you can’t easily separate it once it’s mixed (either as whole bottles, shards of broken bottles, or molten glass).

Unlike plastics, recycling glass does seem to be viable. Even mixed glass can be recycled into other products if it isn't good enough for new bottles. This industry site says that glass recycling in Europe is at 74% https://feve.org/recyclingstats2018/

Yes it can be done, that doesn’t mean it actually is done.

Even in Europe where they are actually trying, 26% of the glass is not recycled.

I don’t think it’s that hard, we are well on the way in the UK.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43709656

> Some 2.5 billion coffee cups are thrown away annually in the UK, almost none of which are recycled because of their plastic lining.

That is woefully out of date. We now have the capacity to recycle all the disposable cups used in the UK. The collecting and sorting is where the effort needs to be put now.

https://www.dssmith.com/recycling/insights/coffee-cups-recyc...

Trained staff, health inspectors and dishwashers solved all of this.

Some friendliness on the part of the establishment as well as good judgement on the part of the employees are enough to gloss over size differences in cups. Most travel mugs you see are going to largely conform to your typical to go cups, and nobody really bats an eye at filling a 14 oz cup and charging it as a 12 oz instead of a 16 oz, but if you fork over a 48 oz monster sized mug, you’re probably going to be charged for more than the large cup size and should expect it. How much more depends on the establishment, but at my old job I probably would have charged you for two 20 oz cups and not given a crap about the spare 8 oz, and if I had to answer to my boss, then most likely he would say he would have done the same.

It’s more important to cultivate good customer relations than to nitpick about exact cup sizes. You want repeat, regular customers giving you a constant revenue stream and you’re not going to get that by interrogating them on precisely how much coffee fits in their damn travel mug.

> Trained staff, health inspectors and dishwashers solved all of this

How? You only explain how cup size may be dealt with - what about the other cases?

I should have been more thorough.

> - Must NOT violate sanitization of the work area; cups provided by customers should not pose any health risks to workers or other customers.

Trained staff can tell customers to hold onto the lid, rinse the bloody mug and fill it with some coffee. The establishment trains the employees to understand how to handle 1. The customer 2. Their mug and 3. Keep the area sanitary.

> - Should be durable enough to survive repeated visits

Durable travel mugs exist.

> - Either the reusable cup must conform to a standard size, baristas need a way to measure liquids consistently without in-cup guides, or coffee could be sold by volume...

Answered more thoroughly higher in the thread.

> - Reusable cups should not introduce enough delay to appreciably disrupt the flow of customers

Dishes are a fact of life in food service. A customer is in charge of keeping their own mugs clean but employees can give them a quick rinse. For mugs that belong to the establishment, trained employees know how to 1. Wash dishes and 2. Load them into a dish sanitizer because they are professionals and it is their job. Health inspectors keep the establishment honest.

> - The cup has to retail for 17 cents.

Like plastic bags in supermarkets, can't one just put the onus on the customer to pay the cost of the container if they don't bring their own?

Splitting hairs, but we already are paying for the container.

Their needs to be a penalty. Another 17 cents on my coffee just dont mean anything when I buy a $4,50 coffee at Starbucks.... (I usually dont buy at Starbucks, but the point stands)

A penalty, or a reward for reusing the container. If your coffee became $3 and you buy one or more a day, that's a reasonable saving over a year for the customers. Pin that with something that makes a public statement that you care about the environment and perhaps there's something here.

Quite a few of the coffee shops I go to have started using these:

https://www.vegware.com/biodegradable-hot-cups/cat_4.html

The problem is that they require heat to activate the composting process, so need special bins that are sent to commercial composting centers, and there are none of those bins around, so they end up in regular garbage bins.

> so they end up in regular garbage bins

So is there any point in using them if they are not composted?

> [0]: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/315159

That link isn’t about a manufacturer developing better cups, it is a retailer spending ten years deciding which type of cup to use. The cup they chose, as far as I can tell from that description, is a standard double-walled PE lined paper cup which has been in wide use for many years now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com