Once in a while it’s ok to do something a-typical, like substitute coffee for a cola, but my, doesn’t it scrub the enamel? Today I just needed something to keep my fingers on the keyboard (they seemed to have lost their will to type) without brewing yet another pot. It’s not so much the caffeine I’m craving, but a reason to get up and leave the laptop to its own devices – and maybe come back and find everything magically organized, typed up and done for the day. I love my work, I really do, but today I’m finding it a wee bit difficult to shift the mounds of paper that have somehow erupted all over my desk and it’s not like I can just grab my laptop and escape, as I made this daft promise to myself to avoid out-of-office offices (read: internet cafés, coffee shops) on Vancouver’s 50th day of garbage strikes at all costs.
Much like my paperwork, those mountains of disposable coffee cups are really starting to mar the picture of an ~ apparently environmentally-caring nation. Those non-recyclable nor compostable single-use cups really define the society that we proudly call ours. Except I’m ok, I only drink iced coffee, and those cups are, uhm, recyclable. And Starbucks is ok, as their cups are made from recycled materials, and the lids are recyclable. And other coffee outlets are ok, as they have to-stay or reusable cups (formerly known simply as “cups” or “mugs”). (This, by the way, does not count if you drink from a reusable cup and also take a non-biodegradable one to “roll-up-the-rim”!) But everyone who brings a travel mug is just fine, too, especially as they’ll likely get a discounted shot to incentivize homemade washing-up. And everyone who just stays put languishing in front of a computer is just fine, too. So we can just go on as before, believing the hype and giving ourselves a satisfied pat on the back.
September 7, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Are you quite sure you have the recycling question the correct way around?
We wash the paper Starbucks cups, flatten them, and put them in the yellow recycling bag, where they are accepted (other than for the past eight weeks, as Sam’s Strike grinds ever onward). They get reduced, repulped, and new paper products made from them.
Plastics (like the iced coffee one), on the other hand, even though we can put them out in the blue box as well, are often difficult to recycle, mostly because there isn’t much of a market for the stuff.
We do, as a society, run through an awful lot of both paper and plastic at our coffee houses. (Well, and other places, too!) It would be better to always have a refillable, reusable, “real” cup with you. Not that that is easy to do, especially when taking the bus into the city and going on foot from meeting to meeting, with stops (for WiFi & sustenance) in between. At least most of the places I patronize do have a proper china mug for my coffee – although now we’re into the environmental costs of dishwashers, superheated water (required to avoid bacteriological infections in restuarants), chemical cleaners (required by the design of dishwashers) … egad, I think I need a coffee just to try and figure out what the least damaging course of action might be!
In many ways the blue and yellow bags, and the blue box, have made us complacent which is a point worthy of the price of admission to Coffee Offline.
September 7, 2007 at 6:04 pm
I’m trusting my sources
…tis said that the waxy lining on the paper cups, which prevents hot beverages disintigrating the vessel, cannot be separated from the paper by recycling plants without huge cost implications. So the question is, has Vancouver invested in one of those fab machines or are the contents of our yellow bags shipped off somewhere to be used in, say, toy manufacturing?!
November 11, 2007 at 5:57 pm
I hadn’t come back here to this particular posting, alas, until today! My fault…
I don’t know the answer to your question directly. Much of municipal recycling is exactly as you suspect: it either gets into the municipal waste stream in another way (but everyone who put out the appropriate bag and box feels good about themselves) or is sold off as raw materials to some overseas factory which will recycle it into more trash we don’t need (and we get to pay some big box store for the privilege, too).
I do know that several years ago the City of Toronto incinerator worked overtime processing “recycling” while the garbage was trucked to Michigan. In their case, there was no market for the outputs from recycling, and it just kept piling up… I’ve heard similar stories from San Francisco.
For what it is worth, since evidently the City of Vancouver does accept Starbucks (et. al.) cups in the yellow bag stream, we do wash ours out, flatten them and put them with all the other paper products (non-newsprint). Lids we dump in the trash, as the blue box gang simply won’t take them. (Nor will they take the lids from tubs, e.g. margarine, yoghourt, etc., even though the lids are one of the four approved types of plastic as are the tubs themselves. And our delightful civic workers toss the lids all over the lane behind my garage – littering! – in the process. It’s enough to make want to simply fill the trash pail and be done with it, except that’ll get you fines galore for “failing to do your civic duty”. These days I am really longing for life in Connecticut, where the town didn’t pick up the trash [hire a private contractor to do it] and in return it could all just go to the dump without further incident. Alas, those days are gone.)
Annoying, isn’t it, that you can’t easily find out whether the unpaid labour that goes into all this separating, washing, flattening, etc., actually achieves anything?