Impact Campaign: SEAL Calls On Starbucks To #UpTheCup | Hacker News Reader

Impact Campaign: SEAL Calls On Starbucks To #UpTheCup

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40 pointsmattharney68 comments

This is misguided. Let's say this campaign succeeds. Maybe 10% of the cups will be recycled, leaving still a ton of waste. It would be much more effective to campaign against single-use cups. I grew up in a time in which you had to bring an empty bottle glass bottle to a shop, and they would take it and give you a full one, which you'd bring back empty next time. If you didn't have one, you'd leave a deposit (effectively buying your first bottle). There is nothing wrong with that system.

You forgot to bring your cup to Starbucks? Fine, buy one. Don't want to keep it? Bring it back when you're done and they credit you the deposit.

I wouldn't call the campaign misguided, since recyclable paper cups would probably be more biodegradable than plastic-coated cups whether they're recycled or not.

Having a bottle deposit would surely be more environmentally friendly, but it would also generate more friction in the sales process and Starbucks would have to consider the business impact. Switching the coating of the cup is, according to the petition, "cost neutral" and there is no real downside to this change, assuming that the recyclable cups are of comparable quality. It seems like an easy and obvious change to make.

Also, switching to recyclable cups doesn't prevent Starbucks from implementing a bottle deposit, if they choose to do so later on.

Reusable cups are still banned at my Starbucks due to covid which is a bit frustrating for me. I've been using my reusable cup for 5 years until covid. They used to sell a cup every year which gave free coffees for the month of January.

yeah feel like Covid is a huge setback for the re-use movement, shopping bags also, as seemed like finally were over the hump as far as adoption and normalization. All out the window now. Plastic bags as far as the eye can see

Wondering what the economics of keeping single use cups but making them out of aluminum would look like? It’s one of the more valuable recyclables (to the point where homeless people will collect them to make some money).

Is aluminum recycling actually valuable to society, or is it only valuable due to the deposit?

It's certainly a step up from plastic. (Here in NY, both aluminum and plastic have the $0.05 deposit, incidentally.)

https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/12/20862775/aluminum-recycli...

> The Aluminum Association, an industry group, says that almost 75 percent of all the aluminum ever produced to date is still in use today.

> Recycling aluminum saves about 90 percent of the energy it takes to make new aluminum, which is great since mining bauxite ore and turning it into aluminum is pretty environmentally destructive and energy-intensive. It takes about twice as much energy to produce new aluminum as it does to produce new plastic.

Aluminum is basically the easiest recyclable material to recycle, and the most cost effective. In places without a deposit, you can still sell bags of aluminum cans to scrap recyclers by weight.

Smelting aluminum ore into aluminum is very energy-intensive, recycling is very cheap. I’d see the energy savings as a benefit.

We need to have Starbucks (and all coffee shops for that matter) offer the option to pay on a sliding scale so you can fill up your 30oz Yeti and pay accordingly. That would be too pro-consumer though.

Starbucks gives, restarted in June (per a reply to another comment of mine here), a 10 cent discount for using a reusable cup. It's not a sliding scale, and it's not a ton of money back. But it's something, and probably more of a discount than the paper cup would cost them.

Unfortunately when it comes to big corporations it's hard to tell if something like this is a real effort or just _greenwashing_ meant to improve company's image in the eyes of customers and help to silence their conscience.

When it comes to single plastic usage I think that putting all the pressure on customers, individuals is simply wrong and not enough, I'm convinced that serious pressure needs to be placed on manufacturers, amount and count of used packaging materials taxed or something like this. Recently I received box of pralines as a gift - amount of various materials used to deliver 15 pieces of chocolate is absolutely insane, ridiculous: hard translucent plastic case, tinfoil, tinfoil pressed/glued with plastic wrapping, lacquered glued paper, non-lacquered paper, plastic tray - there are tons of products like this one on stores shelves and I'm disillusioned and don't believe at all that it's getting "recycled"

In addition to above I don't believe that just putting garbage in the correct bin is enough effort from customer's side, it's just not.

It's notable that Starbucks already gives you a discount if you bring your own coffee container, and that they have a propensity of giving you more if your container is bigger.

I remember when the bakery chain popular here (Baker Square) had a 25 cent credit on every aluminum pie tray. The value was stamped into it so everyone knew it had cash value to return.

That’s how it still worked in the 90s in post-communist Central European countries. Then we got flooded with plastic just like the Westerners.

I was amazed in Berlin the recycling program that makes it very easy to recycle cans and bottles. People made it a job to pickup and search through trash so they could recycle. A can deposit would be welcomed, but maybe I’m old and just remember crushing cans to fill up trash bags to get $7. Sure was fun to get that money as a kid.

Some places you don't get the deposit if the can is crushed, because they need to be able to read the barcode. Which is insane, because crushed cans take up a fraction of the space of whole cans and only makes the recycling process more complex.

The self-service machines used in Germany to collect bottles and cans will do the crushing part for you (after reading the barcode)

Yeah, but collecting whole cans is inconvenient. My normal process is to crush it with my hands immediately after drinking it (top to bottom) so it doesn't take up so much room.

It’s not just that it’s easy… it’s also how much they give you per can or bottle (up to 25 cents)… it’s quite a significant amount, so you end up saving the bottles and taking them to the supermarket to get the refund.

There's a couple of grocery stores here that are recently trying out selling soap and shampoo this way. You bring your own bottle and fill it up. It makes sense and is not much extra hassle to the consumer, however I'm not sure how hard it is to scale logistics-wise.

Similar thing in Austin, TX. City banned single use plastic bags, so HEB (the largest grocer) introduced durable reusable plastic bags to purchase. Unsurprisingly, people ate the cost, treated them like single use bags, and now we have an even worse waste problem.

Liberal policymaking in a nutshell.

Wegmans reusable bags are $1 a pop, so no one's eating the cost. Seems to be quite a decent reuse rate; I've got some several years old at this point.

Not only are they not recyclable, but there's a water cost, energy cost, and a pollution cost to making them. Obviously the fate of humanity doesn't depend on what we do with our coffee cups. But in my opinion the best solution is to have people bring their own cups and just reuse them, and unfortunately only a small percent of people do that.

Back in grad school, to get people to bring their own cups more often, we had the idea to leverage the concept of loss aversion, inspired by the grocery bag "ban" in Los Angeles:

If coffee cost $1.10, instead of giving a $.10 discount for bringing your own cup, we'd lower the price of coffee to $1.00 and charge an extra $.10 for the cup that you forgot to bring.

It turned that another student at Tufts had had the same idea, actually implemented the pilot program at their Tower Cafe, and got great results. Same level of reduction that you get from charging people to bring their own grocery bags.

So with the proof of concept, student surveys, theory behind the idea, etc. we put together the proposal. Six months later we presented to the leadership of the dining program. But the person in charge vetoed it. Her reasoning? "This idea just makes me cringe." And that was the end of it.

I believe this is an idea with long legs and I'm still willing to work on it. Maybe someday soon.

You can read the presentation here: https://a.tmp.ninja/WXcXxXh.pdf (I just picked a random filehosting service, let me know if there's something better out there.)

By the way, everything we know about cup recyclability, Starbucks also knows (and knew in the 1990s). And, if I recall correctly, they knew also knew that providing a discount for bringing your own cup _did not_ increase the rate at which people did it. (If there's enough interest I'll dig up the paper, and I can check if my memory serves me right.)

Unfortunately there hasn't been a lot of pressure on Starbucks to change. This, in my opinion, is not a problem that should be solved with good faith alone, but rather with some kind of tax/fine that applies to all players in the game. Kind of the like the bag ban and grocery store chains.

I'm particularly fond of the "charging for cups" idea because you can then use that money to fund recycling or waste cleanup programs.

>But in my opinion the best solution is to have people bring their own cups and just reuse them, and unfortunately only a small percent of people do that.

You could also just make your own coffee at home and cut out the entire environmental impact of doing business with a wasteful company at all. But this doesn't solve the problem of "I'm somewhere with no coffee, and I want coffee" which Starbucks does. Focusing on making their cups sustainable is probably a much better solution than expecting people to lug around coffee mugs all day.

Arguably, from an environmental and resources standpoint, isn't it better to centralize coffee-making in a few coffee shops rather everyone having their own coffee making equipment at home?

How could that possibly be better environmentally? You're introducing a great deal more commuting (remember, most of the US is not walkable, people aren't walking to coffee shops and their places of work) and idle time for vehicles. And if the shops are consuming a great deal of single-use resources it will produce more waste than making coffee at home, where most people have mugs.

From a pure energy standpoint, simple thermodynamics would dictate he's right. Producing industrial quantities of coffee in a commercial brewer would be much more efficient than individual coffee pots. However all the confounding factors you mention probably balance it in favor of home production.

If we're only considering the energy required to brew the coffee, perhaps. But we cannot neglect the energy required to get to the coffee. It makes no sense to have people go out of their way to get a cup of coffee from a shop when they can brew pots of it at home without ever needing to turn on their car (except to get more beans or grounds, typically done with a grocery run so the energy cost is very small in comparison to shops).

It could maybe make sense for commuters who have shops on their way to their place of work and who only want one cup of coffee at the start of their work day. But this completely neglects everyone who:

1. Works from home (or doesn't work)

2. Doesn't have a shop that's on their way to their workplace

3. Wants more than one cup of coffee

My specific proposal is about giving you the option to buy a cup if you want it, and not if you don't. Everybody wins!

Starbucks offered a discount for bringing your own cup for coffee. Though I rarely got anything other than their plain coffee so I honestly don't know if that discount also applied to the "fancy" drinks. I know they stopped letting you bring your own cup in 2020, not sure if they've resumed their use.

They brought it back[0]. I remember getting discounts for lattes and mochas.

[0] https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2021/starbucks-brings-...

>But in my opinion the best solution is to have people bring their own cups and just reuse them, and unfortunately only a small percent of people do that.

It's also systematically/institutionally discouraged at most places. It was before 2020, and even more so now.

Most places (e.g. many Starbucks) will not let you use a reusable cup when you actually try, even while advertising their "green" policies.

Go ahead and try it, most of the time they'll suggest you pour it into your own reusable cup right after they pour it into a disposable one for you.

There are many other reasons to avoid letting a corpo make your drink.

Coffeeshops (Costa and Starbucks) in the UK offers a 25p discount if you bring your own cup.

Just be aware that there are some strange terms and conditions: Costa requires you to have a lid, or else they can refuse to use it, the rule seems bizarre since they will happily fill your coffee in a lidless ceramic mug, but if you bring a lidless metal thermo mug like mine it is a no-go: https://www.snowpeak.com/collections/mugs/products/ti-double...

It's definitely better than nothing, but sadly this has a very small effect on consumer behavior. This was the main thrust of my presentation.

My proposal was to change the way this "discount" is realized -- by giving everyone the discount, and then only charging people who buy the cups.

> We put together the proposal, and we made it to the leadership of the dining program before the woman in charge vetoed it. Her reasoning? "This idea just makes me cringe." That was the end of it.

Which university was that?

UCLA.

Have you considered checking is Stanford/Berkley/Caltech are doing it and going directly to her boss?

Excellent point - over 60% of the lifecycle costs of a cup are in the earlier phases (like raw materials, production, and transport).

So bringing your own cup is by FAR the best way to mitigate your own personal footprint.

Brewing coffee at home or in the office rather than driving to Starbucks is perhaps a better way. (Disregard for those who walk to Starbucks, but I suspect a lot more environmental impact happens driving to and idling in line at the drive-to Starbucks than from the cups.)

I've seen someone bring their own bags to the grocery store like four or five times since the bag ban got implemented here in LA County. Everyone just gets the thicker plastic "reusable" bags and treats them as disposable. Honestly I think it has made things worse when it comes to the amount of plastic use.

That seems weird, to me. To see it so little, I lived in GA from 2010-2020 and there was no bag ban. I saw way more reusable bags than just four or five times over the last 5 years I was there (about the same time as the bag ban has been in effect in CA). And this was going to the bog standard grocery stores, nothing fancy.

Maybe if they were $2 each instead of $0.25 then...

"The paper cups Starbucks currently uses contain a plastic lining"

When someone says "Paper" cup, I assume paper and some kind of wax as a sealant, not plastic. I wonder if this violates any kind of FDA or FTC rules?

Starbucks isn’t special here, it’s a waterproof cup. I always assumed it was some kind of wax too so I also had a flashback to all the paper cups I threw in a recycling can [0]. But on second thought, what kind of wax deals well with water at 95C ? They’re all plastic coated.

[0] I guess most recycling is land filled or dumped in the ocean anyway, so my sins didn’t affect much of the outcome

Isn't the material used irrelevant though? You can't recycle any paper product once it's been stained with food.

But all food containers are like that. They are not recyclable. In fact, MOST things that you'd expected to be recyclable are not. Your bottle doesn't have a cap on? It will sink in water and end up in a landfill. Glass other color than clear? Landfill. And so on.

I was recently surprised to learn that metal cans are also lined with plastic.

While we're talking about coffee and recycling...I'm pretty sure there's more plastic in a K-cup then there is coffee.

Thankfully, they make reusable k-cups that work surprisingly well and much cheaper than disposable ones. I highly recommend.

Oh for sure - the reusable ones are great.

That being said...it negates the "convenience" factor that attracted me to the Keurig in the first place. I ended up switching back to a regular drip coffee maker with a built-in grinder

They also still use plastic cups (and then give you a paper straw lol)

Yup. The sheer volume of single-use waste our society generates - especially in the US - is ridiculous.

For literally seconds and minutes of use! While leaving pollution behind best measured in decades!

The paper straws are horrible, borderline unusable.

lol I don’t think your comment deserved to be killed, you’re right. Paper cups are just as un-usable without the plastic coating. Still the pollution is a high cost for the convenience of coffee to go. Maybe the best solution is to make sure everyone to have time to make coffee at home instead of going to a drive through Starbucks (drive through takes same amount of time really)

…Or be less addicted to sugar and caffeine.

Easy. Just don’t go to Starbucks and drink your espresso at home in a cup.

We need to stop trying to recycle things, and start burning them for energy.

It's simply better for the environment.

It suffers from not "looking" green, which matters far more to people than actually being green.

I was shocked when I learned about all the things you can't recycle in Switzerland. But it seems that, indeed, burning is the better choice. And it works well in practice.

This is referred to as Waste Valorization[1] and is common in Europe with high temperature incinerators.

[1] There are other forms of valorization other than heat generation; but this one is the easiest to implement at scale.

Depends on the material, really. Switch to multi-stream recycling and reclaim the material as well as possible on a per-stream basis - that's what happens in Sweden, afaik.

It's not really better for the environment because you have all the byproducts of the combustion, some of which can be pretty toxic themselves.

Unless you sustain 1850°C

Sure, good luck with the vessel at that temp

Ceramics can handle it easily.

Plasma, bitches!

How much waste is generated by the drive through windows? Let’s say for talking purposes all fast food places you had to dine in, no drive through. Would this reduce single use packaging and all that goes with it?

Most fast food places are not equipped with dishwashing facilities, but I'm sure they could be added. The only place I know that offers glassware to dine-in customers is Tim Hortons, and that's on hold because of the pandemic.

If you just mean the additional packaging for drive-through customers, not much difference. Just a paper bag.

this is a distraction: paper and plastic, recycled or not, are not a huge pollution problem, they're just not.

they do just fine in landfills, and the world is frankly not running out of space for burying them.

There are important environmental issues to address, and exhausting everybody's patience on completely non toxic, inert or biodegradable "stuff" is missing the opportunity to focus attention on actual threats to health, safety and the future.

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