Better disposable coffee cups can be made with waste from sugar cane | Hacker News Reader

Better disposable coffee cups can be made with waste from sugar cane

economist.com

153 pointsjkuria120 comments

Currently purchasing a full plastics thermoforming line.

Not a chemist, but AFAIK current market available 'biostarch polymers' (AFAIK always PLA; which may be marketed as made from corn, sugar cane, etc.) are actually extremely environmentally unfriendly because of the massive embodied energy required to create the industry-ready polymer from the bio-waste material. Their single benefit is nominal biodegradability.

It is far better for the environment if single use plastics are just minimized, for example by re-using all containers in your supply chain. This has therefore been our focus.

For the last mile to the consumer, however, it's unfortunate that people are now used to disposables, so it's likely going to take a technology shift like Dr. Zhu's or an improved form of traditional techniques such as palm leaf wrapping (common in South and Southeast Asia) or single-use clay pottery (India) to improve the situation.

Our company have been considering sponsoring an open robotics challenge in this space (commercially viable deployments of traditional palm leaf wrapping). If anyone would like to co-sponsor, get in touch.

> It is far better for the environment

I suppose that depends on where the embodied energy comes from, no? If instead of oil or coal, it's all hydro or nuclear, then presumably the biodegradability is an overall benefit?

Second, I'm curious... how actually does one measure the tradeoff between energy usage and biodegradability? The former would seem to be measured in reduction of CO2 output, while biodegradability is in reduction of non-biodegradable mass. But I can't even begin to imagine how to compare the two.

Is there some standard methodology? Or does it just come down to people's personal preferences?

Imo reduction of plastic is certainly important, but we don't seem to have shown that is quite the imparitive that climate change is.

Bioaccumulation of plastics is certainly terrifying, but I just haven't seen evidence that it's the threat to civilization that climate change is.

That's surprising, I'd have assumed there's a bunch of embodied energy in clay pottery too.

I'd certainly have felt more guilty throwing away a single use pottery cup than one made of paper. It's frustrating how counter intuitive a lot of environmental issues are.

I'm sure things get twisted around like plastic recycling.

This is sort of how it seems to me sometimes: https://www.theonion.com/geologists-we-may-be-slowly-running...

It won't necessarily take a technology shift. Single-use containers could also be legislated against. And the reverse supply chains to get containers back to producers put in place.

Or simply start by re-legalizing re-usable containers with some tax breaks to provide an incentive for stores to invest into the technology to fill containers brought by customers while respecting food safety.

> And the reverse supply chains to get containers back to producers put in place.

That isn't as straightforward as it seems, they are returning what is a contaminated waste product. That needs to be kept very separate from the clean food-grade food & packaging deliveries, you can't just chuck a bag of waste in the delivery vehicles.

Soda and juice bottles are also a contaminated waste product, yet in European countries at least, recycling works fine.

It's not the recycling, it's the sending them back through the same supply chain that would be the problem.

Reuse of glass bottles is not recycling (it's reuse.) And there is no problem, it works great.

Use of glass bottles is somewhat controversial in that glass containers mean considerably heavier weight in transport, which in turn means that more energy must be burned to move those trucks. The introduction of plastic packaging immediately led to fuel savings in transport.

That may be the case, but sanitation certainly should not be a concern with glass reuse. Glass is easy to sterilize.

Reuse of plastic soft-drink bottles in northern Europe is somewhat controversial, inasmuch as vast amounts of water must be used to wash and sterilize them.

> Not a chemist, but AFAIK current market available 'biostarch polymers' (AFAIK always PLA; which may be marketed as made from corn, sugar cane, etc.) are actually extremely environmentally unfriendly because of the massive embodied energy required to create the industry-ready polymer from the bio-waste material. Their single benefit is nominal biodegradability.

Also not a chemist, but this is reminiscent of "bamboo" fabric that is just Rayon made from bamboo cellulose instead of wood pulp cellulose.

As such, it can be a bit more environmentally friendly to produce, and amenable to production in a closed-loop facility, but isn't any more recyclable or biodegradable:

Eg. From 'Abundance of microplastics in the world's deep seas'[0]:

"Rayon -- a humanmade non-plastic polymer used in personal hygiene products and clothing -- contributed to 56.9% of the total fibres seen, with polyester, polyamides, acetate and acrylic among the others recorded."

Which isn't at all the same thing as fabrics made from actual bamboo fibers (often called 'bamboo linen').

The whole 'greenwashing' thing is super annoying to me, because even when regulating agencies are doing their job properly, so much wiggle-room is left for what marketers are allowed to imply with entirely true statements.

eg. The label lists the fiber content as 'bamboo rayon', and the marketing says "made from environmentally friendly and biodegradable bamboo!", Which glosses over that the process used to turn the bamboo INTO rayon may not have been environmentally friendly, or that while rayon is biodegradable, sort of, if it's in a landfill it's going to stick around a long time.

And then I try to imagine consumer labelling requirements for all materials, sources, methods, and lifecycles, or summarizing these into a simple environmental score, and despair.

[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141216212253.h...

I'd imagine a big challenge with reusable containers in the retail space is food safety, especially in countries with strong regulation. A lot of restaurants in my area won't pour a beverage into a customer supplied container because they're afraid of contaminating the shared area with it. They see disposable cups as more hygienic, even though they are clearly more wasteful.

Is this product better? https://www.pulpac.com/

I know nothing about it other than the company's own claims, but if their claims are true then it seems interesting.

Doesn't seem to support transparency so it's dead in the water for many present-era retail supply chains. Unsure from the site what it is exactly but it sounds a lot like egg cartons or cardboard, which already have their place.

From the article: "Once used, these could be dumped in landfills with a clear conscience."

Naturally biodegradable waste is not landfill material. A well-informed reporter not realising that shows how much work there still is to do.

The EU single use plastic ban [0] is coming in July 20201. Is there any US equivalent yet?

[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190321IP...

The EU 1999 Landfill Directive is about the phase-out of biodegradable waste going to landfill. Nothing which composts or biodegrades should be disposed of this way.

These cups should not go in this waste stream, the only end of life is commercial composting as I don't believe they are suitable for home composting.

https://www.ciwm.co.uk/ciwm/knowledge/landfill-directive.asp...

This always irked me about my wonderful doggie poop bags. For 3 years I've been using Earth Rated bags made out of corn starch but they go into the same bin as all the plastic poop bags. So they literally drown in a sea of plastic because I don't want to just leave them by the road.

I've had a quick look at those bags. They seem to do two types, one has an Oxo-degradable additive which is currently being banned in the EU[1] because all it does is break the bag down into microplastics. The visible litter problem may be reduced but it's not a good solution to anything.

Their other bags, the light green ones, are only industrial compostable. They will stay as a plastic bag unless they go down the correct waste stream.

People leaving their dog poo bags has been a problem for years, in the UK they are know as Dog Poo Trees and are disgusting.

[1] https://www.letsrecycle.com/news/latest-news/wrap-caught-up-...

Your full dog poop bags are not commercially compostable.

Dog poop is nominally compostable but if most people were composting their pet's waste the concentration would be way too high.

I pick up my dog's shit with BPI approved baggies because I want the plastic to break down, but mass pet waste needs to go into a real landfill with liners and vents and stuff.

Yeah Trump banned biodegradable alternatives, and made a coal subsidy.

> They also found that when they made a cup out of the stuff and filled it with water heated almost to boiling point, the cup remained intact for more than two hours. Though this is not as long as a plastic cup would last (it would survive indefinitely) it is long enough for all practical purposes.

Err, no. A disposable cup that leaks after 2 hours is a horrible product. Disposable cups are at their most useful in the car, and it’s easy for a bit of coffee to be left in a cup for more than a couple of hours.

To me, drinking in a car is a very American thing and I don't think this would be a problem here. If this product works in most of the world but not the US, it would still be better than using plastic cups everywhere.

Although paper cups are already common anyway.

People drink in their car all over the world, what makes it "very American"?

> A drive-through or drive-thru (a sensational spelling of the word through), is a type of take-out service provided by a business that allows customers to purchase products without leaving their cars. The format was pioneered in the United States in the 1930s by Jordan Martin,but has since spread to other countries.

> In 1981, Max Hamburgers opened Northern Europe's first drive-in in Piteå.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive-through

American infrastructure is built around cars, more so than many (/most?) other countries. Towns/cities in Europe are generally built to be walkable.

At least here in Norway it would be very unusual for a coffee cup to be left in the car and anyway many of those who do drink a lot of coffee on the go use a reusable cup bought from a petrol station that gives you a year of 'free' coffee. See https://www.circlek.no/koppen for instance.

That's pretty cool. How much is that? "Costa Coffee" (a UK chain) machines are in lots of petrol stations nowadays, but I'm not aware of any kind of subscription.

For the standard 240 ml cup it costs 349 kr a year including the cup, if you reuse last year's cup it's 299 kr and they apply a sticker to the cup to say which year it applies to. Or you can buy a fancy vacuum cup at 499 kr a year. If you register for Circle K Extra and use more than a 1000 litre of fuel a year (800 litre if you pay with a Circle K Mastercard) then you get the standard cup deal free. 1 GBP = 12 kr at the moment. So the standard cup is a bit under 30 quid, 25 to renew. So if you use it even only once a week it pays.

Pret a Manger has a coffee subscription program in the UK, at £20/month. Not quite the same model as petrol stations, but close.

Here in the UK it's quite unusual for a coffee shop to have parking facilities. Drinking takeaway coffee is practically always done by people who are walking somewhere.

It might be unusal for them to have dedicated parking facilities (though there are a good number of Starbucks and Costa drive thrus now) but outside of London and city centres there is almost always shared parking close by.

I'm in the UK too, and I've found there are separate coffee shops that are focused on pedestrians vs car users. The first are your typical shops on the high street (which yes you could park near to but that's not really the focus) while the second are in motorway services or in a retail park built around a car park (what Americans would call a "strip mall"). If you're a regular user of either one then it's quite easy to imagine the other doesn't exist but actually they're both very common.

It probably happens more in America than elsewhere in the world. Simply because Americans probably spend more of their lives inside a car than people from other countries.

I*m not convinced. Pretty much every gas station here in Norway has a convenience store that sells coffee - not really much different in that regard from the US (I'm from the US). Not as many fast food restaurants, though the gas station fare is better here than the US.

In France as well coffee is available in gas stations, highway rest areas, etc. But people usually drink their coffee before going back to their car, not while driving.

I'm in the UK, but was going to say the same thing. I agree with the GP - drinking while driving, or even just the idea of drive-through coffee, are very American things.

I don’t have stats to back me up but are they cup holders or drink holders? Because I think in many parts of the world people mainly put cans and bottles there, than paper cups.

No, they don't. Non-american cars don't even have the hole for the cup (that Ford ones for example have). So, not remotely common, at all.

We need more environmental tech, but we also have to adapt our behaviour a little bit.

How can you make something that is degradable in an environmental friendly way, but also last forever? Something has to give.

> but we also have to adapt our behaviour a little bit

And this is what is largely holding us back. "Fear of loss" is a very big deal whenever you talk about large-scale modifications to a system with which people have grown very familiar.

People can always find a reason why a particular change "simply cannot work" or "is more trouble than it is worth" or "the benefits are not outweighed by the downsides" or "my use does is not compatible" and so on and so forth.

The spectrum is massive. From paper straws to "if you are able and if you live in a place where it is possible, look for ways to not drive so often," lots of people will be in a big hurry to tell you why that flatly cannot be done.

As someone who does transit advocacy in a dense city with good transit, it is very frustrating.

> As someone who does transit advocacy in a dense city with good transit, it is very frustrating.

While going a bit off topic, the issue I have seen with advocacy groups is that they focus on solving for the median case (eg. 80% of trips are less than 5km) whereas people usually take decisions that work for them in the edge cases (what if i need to take my ageing dad to the hospital on a rainy night, what if i have to take my kid to a far away school for a competition).

To drive real habit change, you have to have good solutions for the edge case - otherwise people will just default to re-using their edge case solution for their median use cases (sunk cost).

In the city I live in for example, even 6-7 years ago, it was essentially impossible to find a cab in the rain. I've personally missed a flight due to a sudden downpour.

With reliable and massive inventory of ride sharing NOW available where i live, I am comfortable living without a car. In my hometown where my parents live (a smaller city which also has a transit system but poor cab service), I still would not do that.

I wonder if a hybrid approach between disposable and "keep cup" could work.

The "default" takeaway option could be the short-lasting paper cup.

For car, office or just comfort, you could have a squashy, silicone (stands high temp) outer that would usually only need to be cleaned if the inner cup fails.

A silicone shell with disposable inner would work well for me, at least. The shell would rarely need to be cleaned and can be easily pocketed.

This is why I try to carry my travel mug as much as I can, and most place I buy coffee from gives you a small price reduction (like ¢10) when you bring one.

I guarantee you that most people won't care about the environment after the first time they have to partially disassemble their car to get all the dried coffee out.

Should cars have a coffee tank? Imagine pouring coffee at a stop just like petrol and have dispenser somewhere near driving seat with a mouthpiece.

It could even come with an IV drip. Then you could eat and get caffeinated at the same time.

I think a reusable coffee cup would be a much simpler solution.

A Mercedes-Benz Keurig partnership perhaps.

Then they'll stall the car with their DRM because you bought generic coffee.

That's a good point, but the world goes through something like half a trillion disposable cups per year. Even if 99% of them are used exclusively to store hot liquids in cars for over two hours, that still leaves 5 billion cups per year that we could usefully replace with these.

Just a little overhead of deciding which type of cup you want and to not forget to keep the melting one out of your car.

Someone mentioned a silicone sleeve in the cup holder would be a fine solution to this.

I don’t think it would be the end of luxury if we had to finish our drinks within 2hs. If it had always been that cups leak after 2hs, this wouldn’t be a problem or cars would be designed to make the cup holders easy to wash.

Sounds like these new cups would be perfectly useful in cafes in non-car-centric communities.

Of course a drive-through would not be selling them.

But a cup of water heated to the boiling point would long have cooled off by the 2 hours, so would this still count then?

The article said nothing about maintaining a boil in the test cups - presumably the water in the cups under test cooled as well, no?

Well that's exactly what I'm asking.

PLA is known to get soft at near-boiling temps. Cups do start leaking and generally slump into a puddle. But this is purely an effect of the heat, it can handle the water just fine if it's cold.

This is unmodified PLA so I wonder if this isn't the same with the 'modified' stuff, or if the added fibres get soft when they get wet like paper.

I'm not sure existing paper cups would fair much better, would they?

The millions of drivers with disposable coffee cups in their cars would disagree.

Most disposable coffee cups (the kind you'd find in the Starbucks of the world) have a plastic lining (polyethylene) that's responsible for the cup not devolving into a soggy mess with hot liquids.

Although it appears that replacing the plastic with wax might make it more recyclable/compostable.

Bagasse is widely used for making paper plates, clamshell containers, and other disposables.[1] Cheap, biodegradeable, and non-toxic. What's new here? Smoother texture, perhaps?

[1] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Disposable-bagasse-bi...

Bagasse is short fibers that absorb water and oil readily. Adding longer bamboo fibers seems to increase tolerance for both. The stuff that's out there now wouldn't hold near-boiling water for a minute much less 2 hours, which is their claim.

Bagasse is a long-fiber material, but the usual process for extracting sugar (wire brushes, crushing) leaves you with more of a powder. Longer fibers can be extracted, oriented, and used to make oriented strand board, which is like particleboard but with more tensile strength. Here's some research in Brazil on that.[1] Brazil being the world's largest produce of sugar cane residue, they have plenty of raw material to work with.

Probably good for making IKEA-type furniture even more cheaply.

[1] http://article.sapub.org/pdf/10.5923.j.ijme.20120204.04.pdf

The temperuture of the coffee will drop quickly, so I wonder if it would not resist to water consistently heaten for 2 hours or if it will fall apart after 2 hours if it contained hot water (that would be bad if you forgot your coffee on your desk).

The current PE lined cups will also leak after some time. They are designed for immediate use, not as liquid storage containers. Most of them, especially the higher quality ones, will usually last a day or two before significantly leaking but not always. Don't leave one on your desk overnight, I've seen the messy results!

How about incentivise every coffee place to serve in standard sizes and accept reusable cups from each other where either you can ask for your cup to be filled up or replaced with a similar clean one for a big customer discount? Something similar to returning the glass bottle the fizzy drink came in for a deposit.

Here is one of my favorite things: https://us.huskee.co/swap/

Plus the cups look and feel really nice.

You’d have to solve the sanitization problem. Local growler pubs seem to have solved this pretty well, though.

> she estimates that cups made from the new material would cost $2,333 a tonne. That is half the $4,750 a tonne cost of biodegradable cups made from polylactic acid (fermented plant starch), and only slightly more than the $2,177 a tonne that it takes to make plastic cups.

There you go. The dagger for non-biodegradable plastics come not just from invention, but from invention and value. ~7% increase in price is enough to disrupt.

Disposable items should be one of our most wanted enemies. What about reusable cups like mugs? You should then be expected to BYOC everywhere. Yes that would mean a lot of education and changes of mentallities and that's not going to happen anytime soon unless we pass laws for that kind of thing. And we totally should, IMHO.

(edit: removed the part in which I stated that burning bagasse is clean energy as I want the discussion to be focused on my first point)

Observation from Germany: A couple of years ago I wouldn't bring my own cup, because I was uncomfortable with having conversations about it.

This has changed, because it's now prevalent enough that I'd consider it "not unusual" to have my own cup. Also plenty of places now offer small discounts. I'm not doing it for the discounts, but that of course adds to the normalization. (Also: Covid makes things more complicated and I've been wary of using my reusable cup once again, though I also massively reduced my coffee-not-at-home-consumption, and after all that'll be over at some point.)

I don't think reusable cups are an isuse with covid. After all it's your cup. And the baristas will have to touch disposable one too. So long as you wash it I guess.

Reusable cups allow the customer to contaminate the barista, as well as the other way around, so it's an extra avenue for infection - and a more dangerous one, since he's going to be serving coffee to hundreds more customers and does not get disinfected between each customer.

Coffee shops here in Ireland stopped accepting reusable cups during 2020.

Where does this end? I could also bring my own silverware, my own plate and bowl, my own cloth napkin. “Hey, we’re going to get some soup and go for walk; wanna come?” “Sorry, I can’t, I thought I was going to have a salad and so I only brought my salad plates and utensils with me.”

I think it’s fairly unreasonable to expect people to lug around everything they might need for the day every day.

The spork has existed for some time.

Soldiers and campers have had mess kits where they cooked and ate their food from a compact portable system for at least 100 years.

If anything, modern be silicone has increased the portability and utility of mess kits dramatically in the last 2 decades

You use 'should' a lot. That is a moral judgement, not an argument.

If single-use cups are still going to be around, I’d much rather it be in this form than its current. Having said that, we need a culture shift back to reusable products.

I can’t help but feel like the tech industry is guilty of perpetuating a mindset of just throwing things away and getting a new thing without understanding the consequences.

https://outline.com/d3HG9V

Always love these disposable avenues of eating and drinking. Not sure if it started after seeing willy wonka eating a cup[0] he just drink out of or not.

But I always remember reading an article about Indian food-carts serving tea in the morning[1][2]. They make really thin clay cups to serve it in. When you're done you smash the cup on the road when you're done.

[0] https://twitter.com/omgfacts/status/885198079401631745?lang=... [1] https://vedicmix.com/drink-your-chai-and-break-your-cup/ [2] https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2016/10/26/kolkatas-age-ol...

> When you're done you smash the cup on the road when you're done.

Why would you ever want to encourage people to litter. We need to encourage people to be responsible and dispose of their waste correctly.

Clay is a non-renewable resource.

Clay itself is essentially unlimited... there’s so much of it and it’s constantly being reformed (although on a much slower time scale than, say, wood). However the energy used to fire it might be more of a problem.

The article isn't clear at all on how this compares to existing paper cups.

Papers cups basically all have a wax coating on the inside so they don't absorb your coffee. Otherwise they'd obviously get soaked pretty much immediately. And wax is biodegradable.

Has anything prevented a waxed bagasse cup from being made before? Does the bagasse+bamboo combo still require wax, or is the advantage that it doesn't?

And if the bagasse is already being fully utilized as fuel, is this really going to be an environmental benefit? What will the sugar processing plants use as fuel instead? If it's oil (or coal), would this wind up being worse for the environment overall?

Technically this is interesting... it's just very unclear to me whether it's a good idea.

Sugar processing plants have far more bagasse than they can ever use. My father and great grandfather both worked at sugar mills in Louisiana. Most bagasse sits in gigantic piles that need to be constantly soaked with water (we're talking about a 10,000 ton pile of sugar-enriched fermentable plant matter sitting in the sun during a tropical summer) until it is harvested by companies that make particle board.

> And if the bagasse is already being fully utilized as fuel, is this really going to be an environmental benefit? What will the sugar processing plants use as fuel instead? If it's oil (or coal), would this wind up being worse for the environment overall?

It will turn into a new cotton, or biofuel corn.

Environmentalist laws often have counterintuitive consequences.

Very often, new "technical" plants outprice food crops.

Many cups which appear wax-coated are in fact coated with plastic.

This would be great for coffee chains. Some people think that when you bring you own cup to Starbucks, it'll save a paper cup. This is actually not true. The barista has to use pour the coffee to a new cup and then they'll pour in on yours.

Almost all paper nowadays is made from managed forests (ie. Plantations) and paper is perfectly bio-degradable. So I'm not sure why it's a big problem.

I use a mug because the 50c off pays off within a month and the mug keeps the coffee warm longer than the paper cup and no, the barista pours my coffee directly into the mug

The issue isn’t really the paper (although one can argue that any single use item isn’t ideal), paper coffee cups contain a thin layer of plastic on the inside to prevent leaking, which prevents them from being easily recycled or biodegrading naturally (which also isn’t possible in a landfill). A minority of recycling plants actually has the capability to separate the paper from the plastic, but this is not time or cost efficient and so it’s easier to just throw it out.

Also, some places do brew or mix in a paper cup first, some will brew directly into your cup.

In the UK we have the capability[1][2] to recycle all the traditional PE lined coffee cups we use here.

There are also quite a few collection services[3][4]. One of the challenges is separating the waste ready for recycling so having collection points in cafes, offices, and railway stations[5] is a really good start.

There are also some new cups with reduce the amount of plastic in a cup so that it's below the 5% contamination level fr general paper recycling. Personally I think this is not a solution as it's just gaming the system buy encouraging contamination of the waste stream.

[1] https://www.dssmith.com/recycling/insights/case-studies/case...

[2] https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/james-cropper-paper-m...

[3] https://thefirstmile.co.uk/service/coffee-cup-recycling

[4] https://www.veolia.co.uk/services/coffee-cup-recycling

[5] https://www.networkrail.co.uk/news/network-rail-introduces-c...

It would be kinda insane right now for a barista even to handle any customer's cup, let alone put it down on the counters and machines, where it could touch the spouts and pitchers and whatnot. And to be honest, it still makes sense even without a pandemic, even if the stakes aren't as high. E. coli will always be around.

Is that a Starbucks / state / US rule? In Australian cafes they make the coffee straight in your reusable cup.

It's a Starbucks rules. Most non-chain US coffee shops will happily put the drink straight into your own mug.

This is definitely not true for most coffee chains in the UK (I haven't actually been to starbucks recently). I've watched them make the coffee straight into my cup.

id love to see this for single use containers like the ones they use to ship strawberries, etc.

I remember as a kid in the 90s there was coffee mugs made of potato starch. It was said you could even eat the mug itself if you wanted to. Wonder what happened to those?

KFC trialled an edible cup in 2015 here in the UK. I don't think it took off, more of a gimmick in this form but quite an interesting experiment.

https://metro.co.uk/2015/02/25/kfc-unveils-the-uks-first-edi...

All got eaten?

How is this different to the already widely available bamboo or sugar cane single use containers?

free version of the findings -- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201112113139.h...

Has anyone successfuly quit coffee? I quit cigarettes, alcohol but tried many times to quit coffee and just can't. I feel so terrible it feels it gets worse every day I don't drink, then a little cup of espresso fixes everything.

> Has anyone successfuly quit coffee?

Sure. I assume you tried to go cold turkey on coffee, and didn't like it. I'd suggest the gradual method, which might work better for you.

Over the span of a week, normalize your coffee intake. Have just two cups of coffee a day at a regular time with known quantity of coffee.

Next week, reduce the amount of coffee in one cup by 1/2. So, if you grind 30g of coffee, grind 15g.

The week after that, reduce the amount of coffee in the other cup to the same amount.

The week after that, reduce the amount of coffee in one cup by 1/4 (or, eliminate entirely). One week after that, do the same to the other cup. Before you know it, going cold turkey gives you no symptoms.

You can see how this goes on. Adjust the time period and/or the coffee reduction to whatever works for you. For me, a week and coffee reduction by 1/4th (of the original amount) worked just fine for me.

It took me 4 days of headaches but afterwards I had no symptoms. My friend group did a challenge to go without caffeine for 30 days.

Everyone made it. My "trick" was to treat the withdrawal symptoms like I was coming off of heroine, visualize a clear improvement after the slump. The rest was just to find caffeine free replacements. Coke Zero Caffeine-Free was a blessing.

I “admitted” to my doctor that I’d successfully switched to consciously eating better but that I was still drinking coffee. Her immediate reaction was “So what? Coffee’s not bad for you.”

Now, that’s just one doctor’s opinion, but when I did some follow up research, it did seem like the overall effects were probably very modestly negative at worst and might easily be positive.

In terms of quitting caffeine in general (to which I was previously essentially addicted), it seemed to have a trough at day 4-10 and then was better by around day 20 and didn’t miss it much by around the 6th week. I’m back on it, but quitting it cold turkey took a lot longer than I’d have expected.

Yes... I did. One day I just stopped drinking it. There may be something in your lifestyle that you are doing that coffee hides that you need to change. It could be going to bed too late, eating too late, or even taking a shower too late. All those things can mess with your sleep, and a morning coffee just hides that, even though the damage is still being done.

I’m not a doctor, this isnt medical advice; Ive used L-tyrosine several times to help me quit. I typically use it for 2-3 days and have no with drawl symptoms during that time.

I always go back because it helps with DOMS.

It's like diet coke, you can either gradually wean off over a few months or take a few weeks off work and just bite the bullet.

It typically takes me 2-3 weeks to not miss it. And that's after tapering down consumption. It's definitely doable.

There is no so much "waste" left from sugar cane.

The bagasse is already used as free fuel to boil cane juice.

Only places where electricity, or natural gas is really, really cheap have surplus bagasse.

I'm living in Martinique where there is an important rhum industrie. Another common use of bagasse is compost.

A reusable cup is still higher quality and more eco, right?

Has the 'overton window' of coffee consumption shrunk so completely as to exclude the European way of drinking coffee?

Why can't we just walk up to a bar, order a coffee, have it served in a ceramic cup? I guess the majority of coffee shops not actually having a bar is a bit of a hindrance!

If this can eliminate paper coffee cups with leaking seams, I'm all for it.

We should eliminate single-use items like coffee cups altogether.

If anyone who's reading this has PM Modi's ear, please forward this to him. He loves promoting news such as this.

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