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Comment by jazzyjackson | Hacker News Reader

Similarly I was very dissapointed to find paper coffee cups are almost always lined with plastic. In hindsight it's obvious that paper is not going to hold boiling water, but I dunno, I'm not a paper cup engineer, I guess I thought someone figured it out. Of course I've been tossing the paper cup in the recycling this whole time, which is fine, since it all ends up in the landfill anyway.

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It was always about reduce, reuse, recycle. You can reduce by using your own cups. It’s just a habit we have to get in to. Once we do it’ll be a status signal like YETI on steroids.

It’s disappointing though that you assume that all of your recycling ends up in the landfill. This pervasive myth is spreading through society to the point where recycling companies are literally running TV ads to dispel the myth. Even if it’s locally true for you that your recycling goes to a landfill, it’s important to add a caveat that it’s likely to only be locally true for you. Otherwise other people will become apathetic too.

Because people are starting to recognize recycling for what it is: A largely performative societal ritual that gives us the illusion we are doing something and nothing else. And on top of that we have TWO garbage collection systems that take it to the same place! How much extra resources do we use - fuel, manpower, etc. - to support this duplicity?

Reusing cups often require some level of washing, drying, and/or wiping.

It would be nice if there was more infrastructure for it.

For most people i see at work with their mugs that amounts to either 5 seconds in the sink, or no time at all since they will just slosh the new coffee into the dirty cup.

Can confirm. My coffee mugs get washed once every “ok that’s really gross”. I mean, it always holds the same piping hot liquid and only one person ever drinks out of it. So what’s the point of keeping the mug pristinely clean?

I had to clean my cup, FML!

many places do not have open access to sinks or have it only in bathrooms were they are designed to be hard to use this way.

Please excuse my language but I fucking despise most bathroom sinks. What genius decided to make a super short tap that only extends 4cm from the back wall of the sink. What kind of child must you be to actually wash your hands in sinks like this? Most people are older than 4 and thus have larger hands.

It's nearly impossible for me to wash my hands in most bathroom sinks without punching the sink itself on accident just trying to get my hands in the water stream. I usually have to rinse one hand at a time, sideways just to have the tiniest amount of room

IMO these are because of moron designers who picked the wrong size tap for those kinds of sink.

In a different universe I'd sell stickers for people to buy and stick near any sink like this that's been misdesigned, something like "Warning, the interior designer designing this bathroom was a moron, and choose an inappropriately-sized tap for this sink".

Punching the sink on accident sounds very painful. If it's a recurring accident then you might want to look into improving your hand eye coordination. Try searching on the internet for "improving hand eye coordination", there is a wealth of material.

Best of luck, I hope your hands heal quickly.

Punching was an exaggeration, but the force can vary from a touch to smacking my knuckles against the back depending on how much of a hurry I'm in.

Hand eye coordination doesn't improve the amount of room between the water stream and the sink, but as your comment appears to be in bad faith I'm sure you already know that.

Perhaps your hands are 4cm long so they fit just fine?

Often it's PLA, which although not trivial to compost, will compost in the right conditions.

I think they are pretty awesome as long as you are in a place that takes the incineration approach to waste handling. When we burn biomass for energy we might as well insert a step or two between harvest and energy use that solves some other problems in passing. Trace chemicals in the coating will break up and oxidize just fine.

They did have cups like that, in the 50's. They were extremely bad at the task of letting someone "grab a coffee" and return to their car instead of sitting down at the location, hence when styrofoam and coated-paper options came up, they immediately dominated and were a big enabler of that culture, alongside fast food. I still get cups to go on occasion, but I'm a little more wary now of them being a vector for microplastic consumption.

I'm sure we'll find a way to get acceptable price/performance with fully organic, disposable packaging at some point. The demand is definitely there.

That's why I switched to keep cup I carry around

Same! After something like 12 years I couldn’t imagine not having it around. It makes every coffee taste better.

See also: carrying around your own chopsticks and cutlery.

What about wax linings?

That is the issue, all of this always comes down to cost and volume... and convenience.

Beeswax is perfectly acceptable but it costs more and I don't have the numbers but there is probably not enough bees in the world for all those starbucks cups.

The unpleasant truth that nobody wants to hear is that the only way to solve this is to ban all these disposables and use ceramic cups in the cafe or bring your own flask.

Everybody is an environmentalist until the environmental policy bothers their sense of convenience.

There was a brief push for "keep cups" that seemed to have growing momentum ~2019, but that came to a halt with COVID and it seems isn't coming back any time soon.

I think the fundamental problem is plastic is cheap and companies have zero need to factor in the environmental costs. It's pointless to blame the consumer for buying something that they can afford, these products that do terrible damage to the environment need to be made unaffordable through taxes on the companies producing them.

Indeed perhaps my wording wasn't explicit but by "ban these disposables" I meant ban/regulate them out of the market through governmental policy.

Consumer sentiment alone will never make a significant impact.

You still get a discount for bringing your own cups to coffee shops, in the UK at least!

In the U.S. it's a per-store basis, and often they won't give you a discount unless you're using their own brand of bowl/mug/whatever which itself is often plastic and probably leeching chemicals into the food every time they refill it.

Leaching, technically, not leeching.

That and the Boogeyman of food safety liability.

God forbid you get a drop of spit on another thing, in the coffee shop where everyone spews drops of spit everywhere when they order anything at all

I think people are willing to hear it, and they probably know it already. It’s rather that companies aren’t willing to admit it because let’s be honest, if everyone had to bring their own cup to Starbucks, their sales would plummet.

We really need to stop blaming individual people for not doing their part and start blaming the system for having the wrong incentives.

> We really need to stop blaming individual people for not doing their part and start blaming the system for having the wrong incentives.

Why not both?

Yes, we definitely should fix the incentives wherever possible, because many people are just going to blindly follow the incentives. Those who don't will often get outcompeted by those who do.

On the other hand, if ethics does not mean "do not always blindly follow your incentives", I wonder what else it might possibly mean.

Yeah I sort of agree but badgering people for flying or buying a new car or something is I thin just a bit counterproductive because people probably won’t like it very much. It would be more productive to badger representatives to make better legislation.

It used to be that conspicuous consumption was frowned upon, I think that was probably a good thing.

Beeswax wouldn't work because it's melting point (around 140°F) is lower than the temperature coffee and tea are usually brewed and served at. It would just melt.

Subsidize it, let there be enough incentive to have more and more bees. I don't care about the cups, just want more bees.

Wax works great for cold liquids, but melts with anything hot.

I tried it once! You start to see pools of wax float to the surface of your coffee.

If you want to know where your recycling ends up, tape an airtag onto the inside of a paper cup and see where it goes.

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