During the month of April, Zero Waste Vashon and participating local businesses will ask islanders to bring their own mugs for coffee (or tea) at their favorite spots. The campaign is an effort to bring attention to the increasingly urgent problem of single-use item disposal and its related waste and recycling issues.
“We want to encourage our community to reduce, reuse, recyle and most importantly, rethink,” Zero Waste Vashon board member Jeremy Hale said of the effort.
Why coffee cups?
For those concerned about climate change and humanity’s collective carbon footprint on this planet, Hale said that plastic pollution has been a focus of attention recently as oceans and landfills overflow with the material that has become synonymous with a “throw-away” society. Single-use plastic items are of particular concern, because they contribute nearly inconceivable amounts to the waste stream. This is where the cups come in.
“Most coffee cups have a thin layer of polyethylene plastic on the inside to prevent the hot liquid from infiltrating the paper cup, thus making them non-recyclable with other paper products,” Hale explained. “They are garbage and must be landfilled.”
And the scope of the problem is immense, with some reports putting “disposable” coffee cup use in the U.S. alone at 110 million per day. With a carbon footprint of each cup reportedly — according to a study done by Starbucks — 0.24 pounds, this country’s total carbon footprint of take-away coffee cups is about 26.5 million pounds a day.
What can be done?
Hale noted that some people say that “we can’t recycle our way out of this mess,” and that he and ZWV agree with that assessment.
“About a month ago we [Zero Waste Vashon] met about what we could do to influence people to change their behavior,” he said. “And we knew that the city of Tacoma had run a ‘bring your own’ campaign, so we decided to put a committee together to work on something similar for Vashon.”
After meeting with groups involved in the Tacoma program and outlining an island campaign on paper, Hale said that he and other members of ZWV visited Vashon businesses to discuss the idea.
“We had enthusiastic responses from everyone we spoke to,” he said. “There were good conversations, with good input from the business owners.”
How does it work?
For the month of April, coffee (or tea) drinking islanders who bring their own non-disposable mug, thermos or container of choice to AJ’s Espresso, Anu Rana’s Healthy Kitchen, the Burton Coffee Stand, Café Luna, Snapdragon, The Vashon Island Coffee Roasterie and Minglement, the Wild Mermaid, Thriftway, the Vashon Island Baking Company or the Vashon Theatre will get them filled at a discount (determined by each individual business).
“It’s such a simple thing that everyone can do, and anything we can do to minimize our overall waste stream is beneficial,” Hale said of the project, which several island businesses have said they would continue beyond April. “We’d all like to change the world. Sometimes you just have to take it one coffee cup at a time.”
