7 ms·
If you don't think the people who work at these companies care about making better cups, read the following article.[0] There is a big opportunity for making a
by pg_bot 7y ago
If you don't think the people who work at these companies care about making better cups, read the following article.[0] There is a big opportunity for making a better disposable cup, but there are many engineering hurdles to jump over.
- The cup has to retail for 17 cents.
- It has to support a lid that is resealable.
- It has to tip over and not spill.
- It has to handle high temperatures.
- It can't alter the taste of the liquid inside.
- It has to be biodegradable.
- It can't catastrophically fail if the liquid is left inside for too long.
Seems like a tough challenge to me.
[0]: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/315159 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/315159
- zeta0134 7y agoIt's worth pointing out that the obvious alternative, reusable to-go cups, need to solve an additional set of challenges: - Must NOT violate sanitization of the work area; cups provided by customers should not pose any health risks to workers or other customers. - Should be durable enough to survive repeated visits - Either the reusable cup must conform to a standard size, baristas need a way to measure liquids consistently without in-cup guides, or coffee could be sold by volume... - Reusable cups should not introduce enough delay to appreciably disrupt the flow of customers Disposable cups have the great advantage of being standardized by the company and solve a lot of these problems, especially the health problems. This is just off the top of my head, I'm sure I'm missing some other great points. This is a much harder problem than it appears on the surface; the devil's in the details.
- pg_bot 7y agoFrom what I've read the reusables have to be used ~70 times to be more environmentally friendly than the current disposables. I think the easiest win would be designating between sit down and take out customers. Sit down customers could be given porcelain or some other washable container. However this would increase labor costs for businesses so you don't automatically get a free win.
- jdavis703 7y agoI’ve been searching for this data for a while. Mind sharing your sources?
- pg_bot 7y agohttp://www.recyclingadvocates.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Fisher2008_DisposableCupThesis.pdf http://www.recyclingadvocates.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03...
- SllX 7y agoPlenty of cafés already have coffee mugs and glasses. I’m drinking a cup of coffee from a Homer Laughlin mug warmed atop the espresso machine at a small mom and pop establishment right now. When I’m done with it, it will go into a bus bin a few feet away and washed by the staff here whenever they’re not too busy to do a load of dishes. If I had brought my own cup, it would have been a 10¢ discount but to be honest, their mugs are better than mine.
- jspash 7y agoSurely the 10¢ discount should be for the people who _don't_ bring their own cup. But since it's a small shop I assume the 10¢ "fee" is to subsidise the dishwashing labour.
- SllX 7y agoThe idea is you’re not paying for the takeaway cup, lid and (usually) sleeve, and you’re not using a store provided cup either.
- baroffoos 7y agoThis stat gets thrown around for a lot of different kinds of reusable products but what no one ever mentions is what does environmentally friendly actually mean. When I have looked it up its always simply looking at energy usage to produce the product when by far the biggest impact of our throwaway products is that they end up blowing around the streets or they fall in to the ocean. And even if you do put them in the recycling bin they mostly end up shipped to the 3rd world to be burned or thrown in the ocean. Also even just looking about the energy usage, 70 times is quite low. A proper coffee cup lasts a lot longer than 70 uses. Really they don't ever break unless dropped.
- usefulcat 7y agoSeems like some sort of deposit system might work. First time, customer buys an inexpensive but reusable cup, which they can take with them. On a following visit, customer exchanges this cup for a clean one, which they can also keep or trade in on a subsequent visit. The retailer would have to wash the cups but at least that would solve the sanitation and consistent serving size issues. After too much wear and tear the cups would eventually need to be recycled, but that cost should be relatively predictable and amortizable, especially at scale.
- rorykoehler 7y agoNeeds to be asynchronous. You pay for the cup when you buy a drink and you can drop it off at any disposal machine and get your money for the cup back. The problem to solve is that no one wants to carry a cup around for longer than necessary. Buy, drink, dispose. The government could help a lot by creating a standard cup and mandating all companies have to use them.
- mikekchar 7y ago> The problem to solve is that no one wants to carry a cup around for longer than necessary. Buy, drink, dispose. This is a cultural problem. Women carry around handbags that are jammed to the brim with junk. Men don't generally carry handbags at all. There is no place to put a cup. In Japan there are virtually no trashcans and people are culturally taught not to litter, so everybody has to carry their trash home with them. There is even a movement to disallow workers from using trash bins at work! When I worked at the local high school, I was forced to take all my trash home at the end of each day. In that kind of environment, you naturally start to carry bags to store stuff until you can get home. Now I have a handbag that I carry with me everywhere. Usually it contains my wallet, my cell phone, a cloth shopping bag and any garbage I happen to have. It's pretty normal here, I think. If reusable drink containers were available, I don't think it would be long until all bags had "cup holders" in them. But first you need to have a "take your trash home" culture. It's taken Japan decades to make that work. It's not impossible, but it takes time.
- 7y ago
- tptacek 7y agoHow big a deal could the sanitization thing really be? Every coffee shop I've been to, including Starbucks, will fill pretty much any cup you give them. The only rule I'm aware of is that they're not supposed to handle the lids. Apropos nothing much, my brother owns a coffee shop in suburban Chicago, and their clientele is mostly local; they have a whole collection of old mugs, which they let customers take with them and return later.
- SllX 7y agoYou shouldn’t be downvoted for this, you’re absolutely correct about bringing your own cups.
- tptacek 7y agoThanks! A bit of friendly advice: voting on HN is a stochastic process, and by the time I saw this comment, it had already been upvoted many times. This is one of the reasons the guidelines ask not to comment on voting (but not the most important reason). I have trouble with this too! A sort-of-obvious trick: instead of discussing whether something should be downvoted, say you upvoted it and why. "I upvoted this, because every cafe I've visited fills third party cups too" says the same thing without litigating the vote, and also emphasizes the new information you're adding. SNOOT MODE OFF!
- SllX 7y agoOnce again, you are absolutely right. I just reviewed the guidelines again, but thank you for the reminder.
- pg_bot 7y agoI would be wary of selection bias in the people who already use reusable containers. They might be more diligent in their sanitation than a larger population would be. Anyone in the food service business that is good, cares deeply about health inspections. I can foresee some problems with the plan. For example, you might get higher turnover because staff members are sick of cleaning dirty cups. It might take longer to serve each customer which would usually leads to less business. People who aren't aware that they need to bring a cup might leave empty handed and never return. It might be easy to do the occasional mug, but at lunch rush with a line of people it may be a different story. I would be highly interested in seeing the results of an experiment where a shop only used reusable cups. I think it might surface problems that you might not think of. Not to say that it couldn't be solvable.
- SllX 7y agoTrained staff, health inspectors and dishwashers solved all of this. Some friendliness on the part of the establishment as well as good judgement on the part of the employees are enough to gloss over size differences in cups. Most travel mugs you see are going to largely conform to your typical to go cups, and nobody really bats an eye at filling a 14 oz cup and charging it as a 12 oz instead of a 16 oz, but if you fork over a 48 oz monster sized mug, you’re probably going to be charged for more than the large cup size and should expect it. How much more depends on the establishment, but at my old job I probably would have charged you for two 20 oz cups and not given a crap about the spare 8 oz, and if I had to answer to my boss, then most likely he would say he would have done the same. It’s more important to cultivate good customer relations than to nitpick about exact cup sizes. You want repeat, regular customers giving you a constant revenue stream and you’re not going to get that by interrogating them on precisely how much coffee fits in their damn travel mug.
- jamesrcole 7y ago> Trained staff, health inspectors and dishwashers solved all of this How? You only explain how cup size may be dealt with - what about the other cases?
- SllX 7y agoI should have been more thorough. > - Must NOT violate sanitization of the work area; cups provided by customers should not pose any health risks to workers or other customers. Trained staff can tell customers to hold onto the lid, rinse the bloody mug and fill it with some coffee. The establishment trains the employees to understand how to handle 1. The customer 2. Their mug and 3. Keep the area sanitary. > - Should be durable enough to survive repeated visits Durable travel mugs exist. > - Either the reusable cup must conform to a standard size, baristas need a way to measure liquids consistently without in-cup guides, or coffee could be sold by volume... Answered more thoroughly higher in the thread. > - Reusable cups should not introduce enough delay to appreciably disrupt the flow of customers Dishes are a fact of life in food service. A customer is in charge of keeping their own mugs clean but employees can give them a quick rinse. For mugs that belong to the establishment, trained employees know how to 1. Wash dishes and 2. Load them into a dish sanitizer because they are professionals and it is their job. Health inspectors keep the establishment honest.
- CoolGuySteve 7y agoDidn't we already solve this with recyclable glass and deposits? Beer bottles at least have worked this way my whole life.
- manicdee 7y agoPlot twist: the glass is just crushed and dumped, very little actually gets recycled. Everyone uses different glass for their bottles and you can’t easily separate it once it’s mixed (either as whole bottles, shards of broken bottles, or molten glass).
- CannisterFlux 7y agoUnlike plastics, recycling glass does seem to be viable. Even mixed glass can be recycled into other products if it isn't good enough for new bottles. This industry site says that glass recycling in Europe is at 74% https://feve.org/recyclingstats2018/ https://feve.org/recyclingstats2018/
- manicdee 7y agoYes it can be done, that doesn’t mean it actually is done. Even in Europe where they are actually trying, 26% of the glass is not recycled.
- TheTrotters 7y agoYeah, but you don’t drink a beer on a train in the morning or during a lunchtime walk.
- marcus_holmes 7y agoI bought mulled red wine (gluewine sp?) in a christmas market in Germany this last winter. They sell you a proper coffee-type-mug to drink it from, for 6 euros (about US$7), which you can return when you're done and they'll refund you. I kept mine, it's a nice souvenir of Cologne and I drink my coffee from it every morning :) If you had to pay, say $10 for a proper coffee mug to have your take-away coffee in, but they'd buy back those same coffee mugs for the same price, that would probably solve the problem.
- cf498 7y agoThey most of the time dont actually sell those mugs, the 6€ are a deposit.
- chopin 7y agoYeah, but the deposit is higher than the retail price.
- marcus_holmes 7y agothat's the right price to set it at... just more expensive that it would cost to buy the mug from a mug store rather than a coffee store.
- wink 7y agoDepends where exactly you are, I'd wager 50% of them are currently officially "take it as deposit or as buying" because they're often styled for the specific christmas market and vary from year to year. Not sure why people would collect those, but to each their own.
- gpvos 7y agoRe sp: Glühwein.
- Freak_NL 7y agoSpelling: Glühwein. There is a catch though. Those mugs either stay near the stand they were sold from, or are taken as souvenirs. This works just fine. With buying coffee on the go, people would take their mug along with them to wherever they are going, and you would have to hand it back the next time you visited that particular coffee shop or one of the same franchise. The risk of the mug getting damaged is much higher, and it is not nearly as convenient to carry a dirty mug around as it is to dispose of a used paper cup. A lot would have to chance for such a system to work. Customer mentalities being one aspect.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoI don’t think it’s that hard, we are well on the way in the UK. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43709656 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43709656
- Steve44 7y ago> Some 2.5 billion coffee cups are thrown away annually in the UK, almost none of which are recycled because of their plastic lining. That is woefully out of date. We now have the capacity to recycle all the disposable cups used in the UK. The collecting and sorting is where the effort needs to be put now. https://www.dssmith.com/recycling/insights/coffee-cups-recycling https://www.dssmith.com/recycling/insights/coffee-cups-recyc...
- bArray 7y ago> - The cup has to retail for 17 cents. Like plastic bags in supermarkets, can't one just put the onus on the customer to pay the cost of the container if they don't bring their own?
- gedy 7y agoSplitting hairs, but we already are paying for the container.
- neuronic 7y agoTheir needs to be a penalty. Another 17 cents on my coffee just dont mean anything when I buy a $4,50 coffee at Starbucks.... (I usually dont buy at Starbucks, but the point stands)
- bArray 7y agoA penalty, or a reward for reusing the container. If your coffee became $3 and you buy one or more a day, that's a reasonable saving over a year for the customers. Pin that with something that makes a public statement that you care about the environment and perhaps there's something here.
- snowwolf 7y agoQuite a few of the coffee shops I go to have started using these: https://www.vegware.com/biodegradable-hot-cups/cat_4.html https://www.vegware.com/biodegradable-hot-cups/cat_4.html The problem is that they require heat to activate the composting process, so need special bins that are sent to commercial composting centers, and there are none of those bins around, so they end up in regular garbage bins.
- Steve44 7y ago> so they end up in regular garbage bins So is there any point in using them if they are not composted?
- Steve44 7y ago> [0]: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/315159 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/315159 That link isn’t about a manufacturer developing better cups, it is a retailer spending ten years deciding which type of cup to use. The cup they chose, as far as I can tell from that description, is a standard double-walled PE lined paper cup which has been in wide use for many years now.