Are compostable coffee cups any better for the environment? | Hacker News Reader

Are compostable coffee cups any better for the environment?

abc.net.au

37 pointsadrian_mrd76 comments

Related: "K-Cup creator John Sylvan regrets inventing Keurig coffee pod system":

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/k-cup-creator-john-sylvan-r...

For single-serve coffee, hard to go wrong with the Clever Dripper, which doesn't take much technique (just put in water first then coffee grounds) and uses standard #4 filters:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpOdennxP24

> For single-serve coffee (...) and uses standard #4 filters

Automated machine here [1] (except putting the filter in, and coffee and water every ten cups). Seems to be the only one of its kind as far as I'm aware.

[1] https://severin.com/en-en/coffee/coffee-maker-coffee/coffee-...

I can buy a kettle and the Clever Dripper for a lot less, and use the difference to also buy a good grinder.

Further I do not see that device listed on SCA/ECBC's list, which is for units that get the water up to the correct brewing temperature (though their Cafe Caprice model is):

* https://www.ecbc.no/overview/domestic/approved-brewers/

* https://sca.coffee/certified-home-brewer

Yes! I used an Aeropress for many years and was shocked that the Clever Dripper made noticeably better coffee. Water first makes more consistent coffee indeed. Just gently stir the floating grinds a little to mix them in. For the filters I found Melita Mild to be best (of course depends where you live if you can get them or similar/better)

The Aeropress can do good things, but not following the official recipe. James Hoffman has a nice technique (backed by a lot of experimentation) that works well for me.

But for minimal fuss and consistent results, I agree that something like the clever dripper, a French press, or a "slow flowing" V-shape pourover are the best options.

That said, I don't think "water first" makes much difference. It's a matter of long contact time guaranteeing good extraction, and eliminating the need to worry about precise grind size.

> That said, I don't think "water first" makes much difference.

Hoffman thinks otherwise and explicitly goes over it in the video.

People always seem to forget Reduce Reuse Recycle.

Recycle is the last option for a reason, because it's the last and worst case scenario.

We need to use less coffee cups and if possible reuse them. That's the solution.

But then, how many people buy reusable, hard-plastic coffee cups with a lid — only to discover it’s actually a hassle to carry a used cup with residue coffee in it around, proceed to use them once or twice, then put them into a drawer and forget about them altogether (I’m the first to admit that’s been me, twice already).

These cups are so much worse in terms of manufacturing emissions. I’ve read a comparison of single-use vs. Reusable shopping bags once, which estimated you’d need to use your tote for at least 5 times a week, ten years or more, to offset the emissions caused to manufacture it.

I’m afraid the actual solution is the most inconvenient one: Don’t drink coffee on the go. We won’t get anywhere by pretending we can continue living like we do right now.

Edit: found the source on the carbon footprint comparison: https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...

>only to discover it’s actually a hassle to carry a used cup with residue coffee in it around

Time and time again, individuals have failed to rise to the challenge of tackling a minor inconvenience.

It makes you wonder what they do with plates and cutlery.

I'm envisioning you walking into a McDonalds - "Oh no, I'll take my McChicken on the plate please, fries in this bowl".

You usually do not carry those along in your backpack with your laptop, do you?

Ackshually, I do have a spork[0] with me at all times. It just goes in a tiny side pocket in my backpack with a few napkins and a bottle of hand sanitiser.

I use it when I need to grab something to eat from a store, some pre-packaged salads for example don't come with cutlery or it's so bad I'd rather not use it.

I can lick it and wipe it with the napkins and put it back in the backpack. Most of the times I remember to wash it properly when I get back home :)

[0] https://kupilka.fi/en/shop/kupilka-spork-225-3/

I fail to see why carrying something next to your laptop means you don’t clean it.

IIRC a polyester reusable bag is something like 90 uses to break even in terms of emissions (high but very achievable) while a cotton bag is something like 9000 uses (unlikely to happen for the average bag).

Cotton requires insane amounts of water to produce IIRC, that’s the biggest contributor in its high number

What about the stiffer plastic reusable bags? My cotton tote bags I do basically plan on using for the rest of my life, but I don't typically use them for groceries.

> Reusable shopping bags once, which estimated you’d need to use your tote for at least 5 times a week, ten years or more, to offset the emissions caused to manufacture it.

This is obviously misinformation. Any time some industry is under attack, then all of a sudden “studies” appear that show these wild numbers that “prove” the status quo is “actually better for sure really I promise”, I don’t even need to read further. They either made up the data completely, or cherry-picked to such a level that it would only apply in the most unrealistic scenario.

A key clue here is the focus on manufacturing energy costs. What about the ongoing environmental impact of discarded bags clogging up rivers and oceans? What about the degradation into microplastic? There are probably dozens of other factors also not accounted for in studies like that.

> you’d need to use your tote for at least 5 times a week, ten years or more

You should easily be able to spot this misinformation. A re-useable bag is not 2500x more emissions than a disposable.

A lot of Australian coffee shops give a discount for bringing your own (takeaway) cup. Personally I think they should just charge/tax for single use cups, to the benefit of those sitting in or bringing their own.

Single use plastics, but not bioplastics, are on the way out across Australia, and some more conspicuous forms like bags have recently been phased out. With bags the first step was to start charging for them at the till, which led to many choosing to byo. This was followed by a blanket ban (in my state anyway) in September this year which had suprisingly little fallout.

I also kind of like the idea / various iterations of the Freiberg cup [1], but the fact that they are so easily replaceable makes me wonder how many just end up discarded (esp by those who don't like carrying around a used cup). But I'm sure these questions have answers / solutions.

Those policies can easily backfire. Bags were banned in the UK for the supermarkets to sell or offer, except "bags for life" (thick reusable bags sold at a price of 20p or up). I think the energy cost of manufacturing these is 100-1,000x higher than the old bags and they definitely not getting reused anywhere near that much, the retail price is too low to dissuade purchase.

The problem is that the bags are still too cheap. If you sell them for disposable prices, people will treat them as disposable items.

>I think the energy cost of manufacturing these is 100-1,000x higher

I'd have thought adding a bit more plastic to roll and cut a slightly thicker bag would have a negligible increase in overall impact. You could however easily be right too.

Either way without any reliable source it's fairly meaningless to have an opinion either way.

> Personally I think they should just charge/tax for single use cups

This sends the message that people with money can do whatever they want, environment be dammed. We need to simply ban things that are terrible for future generations, not continue to allow people with money to do it.

Fair point. But this isn't a get out of jail free payment, you're not "offsetting" your cup, just getting charged for it. The social stigma of walking around with a single use coffee cup remains, and may even be amplified. Not to mention that "cafe coffee", at $4-5 / cup (in Australia at least), is already very much a luxury item.

The cup is a product that is currently perceived as gratis / of zero value. Charging for it is intended as a disincentive. In the case of plastic bags (here) it largely worked as such (with prices as low as 10c per bag!) and paved the way for a ban. Though the parallel effect of more resource-intensive bags / cups entering the market / being treated as single use is always a consideration.

But to your broader point, for sure .. bring on a ban.

> The social stigma of walking around with a single use coffee cup remains, and may even be amplified.

I don't think such a stigma exists? As a regular coffee drinker, I've never heard anyone comment upon anothers cup choice or even raise an eyebrow.

We should stigmatise it was the point, I think.

At some point using non-reusable cups and similar things should be akin to smoking in a crowd. And if smoking among other people isn't frowned upon wherever you live, you should start with that first =)

It depends on what you use the money for. If you use it to counteract the externalities the transaction creates, the it should work out in the end.

Yes, rich people can do what they want, but at least it doesn't hurt the rest of the people.

> counteract the externalities the transaction creates

Doing so uses up more time and resources that could have been put to better use had the transaction never occurred in the first place.

This is one of the big problems with relying on the price system exclusively as a mechanism of allocation and regulation. It doesn't work well for regulating externalities when people's budget sets vary across orders of magnitude.

I think people like recycling so much because they can live their high consumption lifestyle then throw the guilt from their high consumption lifestyle in the recycling bin.

This is the documented reason that the plastic manufacturers promoted recycling.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

Research shows, with Human Logic: one small good deed offsets several large bad deeds.

This. Only 5% of post-consumer plastic waste in the US was recycled in 2021.

I misread that as "combustible" and had a very different reaction than the rest of you, I suspect.

Anyway.

A few years ago a good coffeeshop near me tried a new brand of some VERY compostable cups. They were so compostable, in fact, that they would often degrade to the point of failure BEFORE I FINISHED MY COFFEE.

Double- or triple-cupping would prevent this, but presumably that also undoes whatever other benefits were accruing, so they switched back.

This is my problem with the paper straws that are now ubiquitous.

They're not a problem if you drink your soda in ten minutes, but if you want to sip on your iced coffee all morning? Uh oh.

I have read that composable and biodegradable items will not degrade when they are thrown into municipal waste. This is because the waste is sealed in massive containers and without oxygen they will not decompose. Is this still true?

I suppose it would reason that if they were indeed compost-able they could, but not in an anaerobic environment.

> This is because the waste is sealed in massive containers and without oxygen they will not decompose.

Anaerobic breakdown is still a thing. But you get more methane rather than CO2.

Landfills will generally tap "wells" to flare it off. If there's enough, they'll collect it an burn it in containerized generators for electricity and/or heat. It's a really dirty gas, but it can be "refined" and injected into municipal natural gas networks, but imo, that's greenwashing and not worth the effort.

Some municipal compost systems do have sealed vats for their compost processing, which better captures all the methane produced.

But as cities divert more paper/paperboard/compost from the waste stream into the recycling/compost stream, the landfill gas doesn't produce as much methane. The capture systems do best in somewhat old landfills before these diversion programs ramped up.

> the waste is sealed in massive containers and without oxygen they will not decompose

What's the plan then? Keep accumulating airtight containers of waste forever?

My understanding isn't that they are in containers", but the entire mound of trash is wrapped "pvc membranes" and sealed with clay. I think this is done on a daily and weekly basis as the landfill grows.

I know our council (Monash) accepts compostable items in the green waste, and this is being rolled out gradually everywhere.

Don't remember the exact dates, but I think there are plans to make it a nationwide thing by 2030.

(Read the article, looks like the cups contain PFAS too, which could be damaging to health if used to grow food...)

We were given a green waste bin a few years ago. We use it, but I've always wondered... I doubt anyone is sorting through this waste in any useful sense. How in the world would we ever prevent cross-contimination between non-green waste and green waste?

My neighbor, she's well meaning, but she puts her green waste into regular trash bags and chucks it into the green waste bin. That's been going on for 3 years now. I've mentioned it to her and she doesn't seem to get it.

Depends on how your system handles it. In Toronto, they basically pulp it all, put it in a vat of water and scoop off the plastics at the top and really heavy stuff at the bottom before letting it do it's thing in a sealed digester.

As a result, they even accept diapers because they'll at least soak off the stuff worth composting. A last step is to heat it enough to kill off any pathogens.

Also accepts meat/fish/bones.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/organic-waste-composting-1.5...

If your system is just throwing everything into a big piles getting mixed around ("aerated"), the rules get different.

Another city that uses the classic "big piles" method had to ban grass clippings because they contributed to too much odour (too much nitrogen = lots of ammonia, but would've made great fertilizer)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/green-bin-composting...

That's fascinating, I'll have to research my local agency and see if I can find out more. Thanks!

Green waste goes into some sort of composting system. Maybe a bit of compacting on the truck which can break open some of the bags (but doesn't break all of them), then however many days of stick it in a pile, mix up the pile/stick it in a new pile, then filter for big pieces: everything small is organic compost, big items remaining in the compost get resorted.

Your local waste hauler may do compost giveaways in conjunction with your sanitary district. If so, that's where that compost product goes and if you use it, you'll see some small non-organic materials make it through, including bits of plastic bags; but the process means they can label it organic compost.

Keep Cup almost had it right with a reusable coffee cup that came in standard cafe sizes. Too bad the cups themselves weren’t very good and getting replacement parts was very difficult.

> Too bad the cups themselves weren’t very good and getting replacement parts was very difficult.

Can you elaborate? I've had my keep cup for 6 years now and the lid/band have held up. The cork band has a bit of a crack in it but I've ordered a replacement one quite easily... https://au.keepcup.com/shop/replacement-part

The original lids warp all the time.

The cost of a replacement lid is $17AUD plus shipping $9AUD. I can't buy a lid where ever cups are sold. And a new medium cup is like $19 which I could just walk outside and buy when they were everywhere. Their new line starts at $38AUD!

By contrast, a cheapo stainless double insulated cup with a twist on lid is my longest lasting cup ever. It cost me $10. Close to 10 years. Still going strong. And the steel is probably more recyclable than the Keep Cup.

The lids have a tendency to warp at the mouthpiece. I don’t know if it’s from the odd cafe serving coffee above drinkable temperatures or what, but of the 4 I’ve got only one lid is still usable.

Measure coffee by weight and you can accommodate a pretty wide range of reusable cups/mugs.

This doesn’t work in a cafe setting. Keep Cup sizing follows normal take away cups.

I don't think it'd work at Starbucks, but at the smaller local cafes in my area I could definitely see it working. Definitely would be more effort and would require some extra dedicated space at the counter though.

Also it's really only a problem for drip coffee. Just about everything else is either measured beforehand (espresso+milk drinks) or made in a single-serving carafe (pour-over).

Well, Australia barely has any Starbucks. So that's irrelevant here.

Standard size coffee cups here are the measure. The ratio of coffee to milk in milk drinks is determined by the cup size as they are poured to the top. Keep Cups were sized to match what was normally used so it was a drop in replacement.

Burn it?

That's what Japan does. People typically keep three bins: trash, recyclables and burnable trash. The ash is often used for concrete and other industrial products, and sometimes electricity is generated from the heat.

You can also recover the metals, the ferrous ones anyway, because it doesn't get hot enough to burn them off. In theory, great for those objects that are metal stuff inside plastic stuff, so you recover something that you weren't going to (or didn't) recover with other methods.

Interesting charts on Page 18 here: https://vbsa.ch/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Studie-Bunge-Inte...

Most metals end up in the bottom ash, but only half the lead and a small fraction of chromium...

I thought the ash was hazmat though and using it in concrete was a bit experimental.

Maybe. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/climate/sweden-garbage-us...

That one gets too much news coverage. The biggest garbage incinerator in Europe is in Paris: https://sciencespoedj2022.fr/2022/04/19/the-fumes-of-wrath-i...

(and it's not the only one in Paris)

So the goal should be compostable cups that are actually composted. There might be some arguments against the cups if they are not composted, but if you don’t start with the compostable cups you will never reach the goal of compostable cups that are actually composted.

Even that isn't certain. Composting results in the emission of greenhouse gases too - most notable methane which is a 25x stronger GHG than CO2. Best-case scenario, it'll decompose into CO2. But then you have to look at the actual product. Plastic coffee cups are really flimsy, and compostable cups seem to be quite a lot sturdier. When it is getting turned into CO2 anyways, it is better to use a cup which uses less overall material - which would mean a plastic one. A similar argument applies to paper packaging: just because you can recycle or compost it, doesn't mean it is actually good for the environment.

The main goal of reducing single-use plastic is to deal with people just throwing it away on the street or in nature, resulting in animals trying to eat it and dying. When it comes to climate change, using plastic and simply incinerating the waste is probably the better option.

Or using compostable materials and putting them in the landfill. If you use plants to capture carbon and make stuff out of that carbon, and then bury it in the ground, that has to be the best case scenario for climate change, right?

Even if it's made from CO2, it's not net neutral for GWP perspective.

> Composting results in the emission of greenhouse gases too - most notable methane which is a 25x stronger GHG than CO2.

Methane is produced when 'bio' waste breaks down in anearobic environment.

Composting is an aerobic process. So yeah, CO2 produced there. But significantly less harmful than what happens to the same stuff in a landfill.

Although in that case, methane may be captured. Of course never 100%. Perhaps far from it.

If you create a cup from plant material and then after use compost it into plant soil again, using the cup is as bad as a plant growing and dying. Growing plants is not bad for the environment.

Taking oil out of the ground, making it into plastic using energy and chemicals and then after use dumping it into a landfill is bad for the environment.

Methane SHOULD be easy to capture and it is valuable. mostly as fuel, but still better than putting it into the air.

Yes, that would help. But the ultimate goal is less single-use cups. Places like Starbucks, McDonald's, etc. are missing a marketing opportunity.

Compostable cups that are sealed away and not composted are literal carbon sequestration. Same with plastics in a landfill, too, FWIW. Better waste collection, and good landfill practice is the best bang for the buck, IMO.

The goal is low emissions. If compostable cups cause more emissions than non-compostable cups at realistic rates of composting, that's what matters; a theoretically better future rarely excuses a worse present.

If we're talking emissions and coffee then another important aspect is the source / growing practices / distance travelled of the beans. Better labelling around these kind of aspects would better balance the current cafe decision matrix of blend / extraction type / roasting characteristics.

I wonder if there's measurable benefit to reducing shipping weight by roasting closer to the source?

I mean, if you're not shipping the weight of the water then how could there not be? Tho I guess it would come at the expense of local artisan roasteries ...

Honestly though, I think conscientious / well regulated labeling can do a lot of heavy lifting when done correctly. Especially for highlighting what factors you should be considering, rather than those that are being promoted. Let market forces lead to "source-roasting" and other innovative improvements.

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