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A former workplace of mine mandated that no-one was allowed to use re-usable coffee mugs at all. This was done because of the mass of dirty, moldy cups that see

A former workplace of mine mandated that no-one was allowed to use re-usable coffee mugs at all. This was done because of the mass of dirty, moldy cups that seemed to fill every kitchenette in a multi-floor building. The business was a media organization and it seemed to me like reporters were the worst culprits. The company provided styrofoam cups which were consumed at a enormous rate, and this was deemed to be a better solution than trying to get journalists to rinse their cups.

cstrat 7y ago
This just hurts to read... It is almost as bad as the somewhat inexplicable growth in bottled water in places where tap water is perfectly acceptable. In fact many of the branded bottles of water are not spring water but bottled tap water.
- bsaul 7y ago
  this story i keep hearing about tap water beeing just as good as bottle one is really starting to get on my nerves. people don’t spend their money and carry huge loads of water bottles if they can have the equivalent for « free » at home. If they do it’s because the tap water infrastructure (as a whole, up to the kitchen’s tap) alter the taste and quality of the water badly enough, even in the cases where the original source is of comparable quality.
  - kristopolous 7y ago
    Then put a $50 filter at the tap and you're good for probably $25,000 of bottled water. It's marketing that drives the preference. That's why most chronic bottled water drinkers I know surround their life with other bullshit irrelevant products. It's the same mechanics
    - bubblewrap 7y ago
      Filters seem like a lot of hassle, though. You have to keep them clean and exchange them on a regular basis. I don't really trust that solution.
      - fifnir 7y ago
        So what's another plastic bottle in the dump right? Someone will figure it out, as long as you don't need to deal with the hassle
        bubblewrap 7y ago
        In my country, plastic bottles have returnable deposits, so they tend to not end in the dump. There are also glass bottles available. That said, I think plastic can be OK if it is trashed adequately. I don't think my plastic bottles end up in the oceans.
        fifnir 7y ago
        Even if it gets recycled, it's not free. Raw materials need to be collected, processed, and transfered. The bottle-quality plastic has to be created and transfeed to the bottle making factory. The bottles transfered again potentially, filled with water, wrapped in more plastic, transfered again.... all that before recycling.
        bubblewrap 7y ago
        Filters are also not free.
        kristopolous 7y ago
        Sure we aren't at zero yet. But dropping the ecological footprint by 99% is a good first step.
      - kristopolous 7y ago
        Many under-sink filtration systems last at least 10,000 gallons. They take 5 minutes max to replace. Are you saying that 5 minute task every few years is more work then manually lugging 10,000 gallons of water through say, 10,000 separate containers, carrying each one, opening them manually each time, tipping and pouring them, then discarding them? (that's the weight of about 25 cars) Not to be rude but I don't believe you.
    - xorfish 7y ago
      How do you spend $25'000 on bottled water? Where I'm from it costs 16.5 cents per liter. That includes a 2 cent tax for recycling the PET Bottle. $25'000 is more than you need in several lifetimes. But then again, tab water here is excellent and also cool. So I don't see a reason why I should transport bottled water. It is much more convenient and cheaper.
      - kristopolous 7y ago
        There's not very expensive filtration systems rated for 100,000 gallons. The standard kirkland bottled water you see in the US in the standard 80 unit packs would run you $195,000 for that. Municipal water would be about $1,500 for that + $150 filter. It's a 99.2% cheaper option. Oh right and the 1.6 million water bottles you'd not have produced, right.
      - maccard 7y ago
        > How do you spend $25'000 on bottled water? Where I'm from it costs 16.5 cents per liter. That includes a 2 cent tax for recycling the PET Bottle. Many people drinking bottled water aren't drinking the cheapest in the supermarket - the recycling bin outside my flat is regularly filled with 1.5l evian bottles - they're £1 each in the local shop. At one bottle a day, that's ~35 person-years. Not common, but not insane. However, my office has 17 people on my floor. If everyone here drank one bottle of it a day, we'd hit it in 2 years.
        vonmoltke 7y ago
        > Many people drinking bottled water aren't drinking the cheapest in the supermarket - the recycling bin outside my flat is regularly filled with 1.5l evian bottles - they're £1 each in the local shop. At one bottle a day, that's ~35 person-years. Not common, but not insane. Even given expensive name brand water, a $50 filter cartridge only lasts for six months. That's $3150 for the same period. $50 replacing $25,000 is not grounded in reality.
  - acchow 7y ago
    Plenty of people do it out of laziness or perception of quality.
  - cstrat 7y ago
    Fair enough that not all tap water is created equally. I live in Australia (Sydney) and tap water tastes fine to most (obviously a very subjective thing). To be honest, the argument for bottled water (I incorrectly thought) was more due to the convenience factor rather the taste. Clearly there are other points to consider.
    - shard972 7y ago
      Then you don't live in perth where their water is measurably different to east coast water just by it's unusually high alkaline.
  - collyw 7y ago
    They do. In Scotland the tap water is really good (unlike where I live now). There are still large sections of the supermarket with bottled water.
    - gambiting 7y ago
      Pretty much anywhere you go outside of larger cities in Scotland(if you like outdoorsy stuff like I do) has warnings that tap water is supplied directly from the nearest stream/river/lake and is unsafe to drink untreated. I'm perfectly happy to drink tap water nearly anywhere in the UK but any time we go camping in Scotland bottled water is a must because safe tap water is a rarity.
      - peterbraden 7y ago
        This is nonsense, I grew up in Scotland and travelled widely and I’ve never seen such a notice.
        kawsper 7y ago
        Not Scotland, but I've travelled a lot in Wales, and most, if not all, of the cottages we have rented have had these notices.
        gambiting 7y ago
        Stayed up in Glencoe literally 2 months ago and these notices were everywhere. Same when we camped next to Loch Ness, Loch Lomond and in Cairngorms.
        jnty 7y ago
        I've seen the 'private supply' notices but I've never seen them say that water should be treated first (nor have I ever had problems with not.) It's disappointing if they're starting to do this in a blanket fashion.
      - arethuza 7y ago
        I guess it's possible that such places exist that have a private water supply - but in general tap water in Scotland is perfectly safe and tastes lovely. I've certainly never seen a sign anywhere in Scotland that warns about the tap water not being safe.
  - scotty79 7y ago
    > If they do it’s because the tap water infrastructure (as a whole, up to the kitchen’s tap) alter the taste and quality of the water badly enough... That's not it. People don't drink tap water because they don't believe it's safe. People who don't drink tap water usually have no trouble drinking it after it's boiled. And non carbonated bottled water tastes just like tap water and you couldn't tell the two apart if there were from taps and brands you are not familiar with.
    - lsc 7y ago
      I am pretty sure that you could tell the difference between a brand of water that is distilled + minerals added and a brand of water that was not distilled in a blind taste test, especially if you drink mostly water. I think there are even pretty big differences, say, between the tap water in Santa Clara and the tap water in Milpitas, for example. I mean, If your argument is that bottled water is wasteful, I'm not disagreeing, but I am saying that if you drink mostly water, even pretty small differences in the mineral content make detectible differences in taste.
      - woodpanel 7y ago
        "if you drink mostly water, even pretty small differences in the mineral content make detectible differences in taste" absolutely. in the european cities where i lived, you could sometimes tell to which aquifer a household is connected. Depending on the neighborhood some need to clean their bathroom appliances from chalk twice as often.
      - lazerwalker 7y ago
        I recall doing a science project in middle school where I did double-blind taste tests of tap water with a half-dozen brands of bottled water (in a place with decent-tasting tap water, FWIW). IIRC, people showed no statistically significant preference for Evian or other fancy bottled water over the local tap water. That isn't to say that there's no taste difference, but that preferring a specific brand of bottled water is likely to be much more about the subconscious effect of marketing than something a priori more enjoyable about the mineral content of a specific brand.
  - vidarh 7y ago
    A few years ago I worked in an office where people had kept refilling filter jugs for years, and I just started using the tap because the filter was too slow and annoying. Took a few weeks and everyone had stopped using the filter - all it took was seeing someone else drink water from the tap, and gradually people would do the same I did and drink from the tap when the jug was empty and realize it tasted perfectly fine. Probably better than the filter, frankly - I don't want to think about how rarely that filter was replaced and the jug washed. Point being that while some places do have awful tap water, a lot of people just drink bottled or filtered water because they see people drink bottled or filtered water and copy that without even stopping to consider if their tap water is good enough or not.
  - Veen 7y ago
    It is just as good as tap water when it is tap water. https://www.ecowatch.com/bottled-water-sources-tap-2537510642.html https://www.ecowatch.com/bottled-water-sources-tap-253751064...
  - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
    My chemistry teacher reports that she has issues when she drinks the city water because something something surgically-removed kidney stones. You might also have to modify the chemical makeup of the tap water itself. Personally, I drink tap, but that's mostly because someone won't hook up the fridge (and nobody else in the family likes ice, for some reason.)
- rjf72 7y ago
  To take things from a different perspective, I find people judging what others ought consider acceptable to be inexplicable. I find people buying $200 sneakers that offer no significant performance improvement over much cheaper alternatives to be 'inexplicable.' I find people buying $1000 phones when a $200 phone would perform literally 100% of a purchaser's tasks to 100% acceptability, to be 'inexplicable'. I even find people buying new cars 'inexplicable' given their hyper-depreciation - meaning a lightly used car is generally a vastly better value. Of course I put 'inexplicable' in single quotes because these things are all completely explicable. Personal choice is a right of every person in a free society, and people have different views and values. And my examples understate the relevance of this as this choice is far more significant, and frequently personal, when it comes to what people consume than whatever stuff people buy for image crafting.
  - hyperbovine 7y ago
    I’m with you all the way, so long as externalities are priced in.
    - jnty 7y ago
      This is getting closer to a solution but it assumes that damage is totally reversible given money. If you punch me and break my nose, I can sue you for 'damages' (loss of earnings, medical expenses etc) and in the eyes of civil law everything is OK - but really it would be much better if it hadn't happened in the first place! We recognise that by placing a blanket criminal ban on assault, and in the future I think we're going to have to accept that a lot more for negative-externality actions.
      - hyperbovine 7y ago
        > We recognise that by placing a blanket criminal ban on assault, and in the future I think we're going to have to accept that a lot more for negative-externality actions. But we don't. Rather, we make the price of engaging in that activity extremely high. What would be closest to what you are advocating would be something like summary execution for all cases of homicide and rape, and no civilized country does that.
- chronogram 7y ago
  Tap water here in the Netherlands is excellent, and I’d much prefer it over bottled water, but that’s only available in places where you’d take your jacket off: home, friends, work, school, hairdresser and the likes. If you’re going somewhere you can bring water or buy water in bottles, but I’ve never seen other ways of getting water.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    That's one thing that's changed since my childhood. As a kid, here in the UK, most schools, public buildings and towns (in the street) had drinking fountains. Most town centres, shopping areas, tourist spots etc had them. Quite often they had a way to fill a bottle too. In the eighties they died out, and you'll rarely to never see one today. Why? They certainly weren't unsafe. Bottled water producers seem to have managed to put people off our overwhelmingly safe tap water and drinking fountains. Now tap is seen as second rate somehow. Put in a vending machine instead, etc. Drinking fountains in schools and streets are long gone. So now everyone can buy a Coke or bottled water, complete with single use plastic, and we mistakenly call that progress. The same people seem fine using tap water for tea, ice, juice etc. Yet another bit of progress that baffles me. :)
    - iamphilrae 7y ago
      I remember mentioning this in a comment thread on Instagram. One response came from someone in the UK who said something along the lines of... “It has been scientifically proven that our water contains high concentrations of cocaine, heroin and other drugs. That’s why I will only drink bottled water.” facepalm I remember in the 80’s when travelling to Europe, whether you could drink the tap water was always a question to ask at the start of the holiday. 30 years later, we are now questioning our own tap water even though the rest of the EU and America have caught up, with water quality that is on par with anything that could be purchased in a bottle.
    - mrguyorama 7y ago
      Here in a small American city, fountains are seemingly coming back into vogue
- petre 7y ago
  We have a filter. Although tap water is clean it retains chlorine and pipe scaling impurities. Bottled water was found to contain microplastics.
8_hours_ago 7y ago
I feel like dirty dishes have been a problem in every place I have worked. Have any companies wised up and installed a dishwasher in each kitchen, and have someone assigned to run them every night? Or even just pay someone to wash the dishes by hand?
- cstrat 7y ago
  We've got a dishwasher in each office, and the office manager/reception tidy up. Most people put their own plates away. However like with litter and graffiti in the streets, if people let even a small amount of cups & plates build up - then everyone seems to think it's time to dump their stuff in the sink too.
- slavik81 7y ago
  I worked in an office with company mugs and a pair of dishwashers. It was great. We had no problems at all.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    Ohhh, the perfect alternating clean dishwasher and dirty dishwasher approach so you never have to queue with the sink or cabinets. My dream home will have 2 dishwashers for that reason.
    - skookumchuck 7y ago
      Even better is to have the kitchen cabinets accept dishwasher racks. Then clearing out the dishwasher is simple. You need 3 racks (and one dishwasher): Rack 1: in the dishwasher being washed Rack 2: in the cabinet of clean dishes Rack 3: set out to be filled with dirty dishes Cheaper than an extra dishwasher!
    - masto 7y ago
      We got one of these. It's been great. https://www.fisherpaykel.com/us/kitchen/dish-washers/dishdrawer/24-double-dishdrawer1.DD24DAX9_N.html https://www.fisherpaykel.com/us/kitchen/dish-washers/dishdra...
rvp-x 7y ago
I've worked at places that had a fridge where people stored their boxed meals, and they had a rule that the fridge is emptied (to the garbage) on the weekend, to avoid accumulating people's forgotten rotting food. Seems like it can be applied to cups as well.
mrbonner 7y ago
At my workplace there are occasions when some people just push their own glasses, cups or bottle waters up touching the nozzle. It is so unsanitary. When we have the disposable cups this kind of issue wouldn’t happen.
- verelo 7y ago
  "It is so unsanitary." Is it really that bad? As in, so bad it justifies the amount of waste the alternatives produce? I'm sure it's not the worst thing you deal with on a daily basis i.e. door handles are pretty gross.
  - Stratoscope 7y ago
    > door handles are pretty gross. Indeed they are. I am probably weird, but when I walk into our building I have a paper towel in my hand to grab the door handle. In fact there are two door handles, one from the parking lot and one into the building, so I use one side of the paper towel first, then fold it in half with a clean side on the outside and use that for the building door handle. Similarly at the cafeteria. I use a "clean hand, dirty hand" system there. My right hand gets dirty handling shared serving utensils, while my left hand stays clean handling fresh plates and such. And then before I eat I find a way to inconspicuously wash my dirty hand. Especially when I've gone to the salad bar and gotten icky sticky salad dressing on my dirty hand. Now that is gross. Weird? For sure. But at the age of 67 my immune system is probably not as good as it was when I was 20-something. It's been working so far. I seem to be one of the few people in the office who hasn't been out with a bad cold this year. Yes, those paper towels are pure waste. I toss them in the compost bin, and I'm grateful to have used them. Edit: if any of the multiple downvoters could mention what they objected to here, I would be genuinely grateful for the feedback so I can do a better job with my comments. Or if it's something I should have figured out on my own, I will do my best to sort it out. :-) Thanks!
    - sumedh 7y ago
      > I seem to be one of the few people in the office who hasn't been out with a bad cold this year. Probably because your immune system is good?
partiallypro 7y ago
This same thing is unfolding in my office. They are getting rid of paper cups but no one washes their dishes. I don't understand what's wrong with paper cups? They are biodegradable.
- bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
  If they have a plastic lining on the inside (for waterproofing) then they’re not
  - ihuman 7y ago
    According to the article they are, but only if you have a machine to separate the wax lining.
    - manicdee 7y ago
      If you have the machine, and the cup is in pristine condition (ie: hasn’t been used). Outside those conditions, “disposable” coffee cups of all types lead to long-term pollution.
    - Steve44 7y ago
      The standard paper coffee cups are about 92% paper and 8% PE for the waterproof lining. Come compostable cups have a lining made from a form of PLA and are, in theory, compostable under the right commercial conditions. The PE lined cups can be recycled, the UK currently has capacity to recycle all the 2.5 billion cups we use annually.
- megaremote 7y ago
  They are still a huge waste, even if they are biodegradable.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    Biodegradable materials get reabsorbed by the environment by definition. They're also recycleable. For instance, cardboard breaks down within two months.
fouc 7y ago
Interestingly I remember seeing signs at Booster Juice company that talked about why they chose to keep using styrofoam cups for environmental reasons. Because the carbon footprint of producing non-styrofoam cups was apparently much higher.
- prennert 7y ago
  That seems like they are optimising for a too narrow cost function. Carbon emissions are only part of the environment impact.
- maccard 7y ago
  Than single use paper cups yes, the energy required is much higher. Unfortunately they're not comparing against reusable cups. A reusable glasscup breaks even in terms of energy vs a styrofoam at ~50 re uses. That doesn't price in the lifetime cost of disposing of the styrofoam, and glass is pretty much inert. [0] https://terngoods.com/blogs/learn/cups-single-use-disposable-vs-reusable-an-honest-comparison https://terngoods.com/blogs/learn/cups-single-use-disposable...
01100011 7y ago
What's wrong with styrofoam, assuming it is disposed of properly? Does it cause problems when tossed into a landfill? I think styrofoam is actually pretty good, per unit of source material, because it is expanded so much.
- zone411 7y ago
  https://sustainability.wustl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Impacts-of-Styrofoam.pdf https://sustainability.wustl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/... Styrofoam for single-use products has been banned in NYC already.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    Can you produce a less fanatical source? This PDF spuriously links styrofoam to Parkinson's disease. As I've seen vaccinations blamed for autism, I'm going to disregard this source as reliable.
    - zone411 7y ago
      You're right, not a good source. Google does a poor job of bringing up unbiased soruces. A better term to search for is expanded polystyrene foam. Here are some sources: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33334994 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33334994 https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/aug/27/styrene-carcinogen-brands-polystyrene-foam-food-packaging https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/aug/27... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polystyrene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polystyrene https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-12299-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-12299-2 The EU has decided to ban throwaway polystyrene foam but I don't know if this counts for much as I don't know how much science was taken into account. There will be a comprehensive risk assessment by the EPA: https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-tsca/risk-evaluation-cyclic-aliphatic-bromide-cluster-hbcd https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-t.... My worry is when packaging EPS breaks down into tiny particles that could be inhaled. This cannot be great.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ip26 7y ago
Are they communal cups? At my office, everyone has their own cup. Perhaps as a happy side effect, there are automatically zero mugs lying around anywhere, because if you leave your mug somewhere then what are you going to put your coffee in? Additionally since most people have a unique cup, other people will recognize yours and try to return it if you misplaced it.
village-idiot 7y ago
Do they not hire adults? That’s disgusting.
iscrewyou 7y ago
Styrofoam cups...for coffee. I can't even. People rather use those than wash reusable ones? I find it fascinating.
antris 7y ago
This is a very logical result when there's no tax related to the environmental effect. Doing this should be so expensive that the option wouldn't be considered. Or then they do it anyway and pay huge taxes for it, paying their share of the recycling / cleaning up.
scotty79 7y ago
My office had a lot of ceramic cups that were taken by employees from the cabinet, used and left wherever in the kitchenette. There was one dedicated employee whose main job was to gather the cups and put them in the dishwasher and after they are cleaned, put them back in the cabinet. Dishwasher ran constantly and that employee kept kitchenette neat in between of cup handling. I think there were even two dishwashers so one can be loaded while the other is working. The system was pretty much perfect. If people forgot to bring their cups back to kitchenette they were gathered by the cleaners at the end of the day from employees desks.
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  these kind of jobs are cut first when troubles come to the company... and so everybody literally feels we're in trouble
  - notyourwork 7y ago
    There’s always a first to cut job in every business.
- mft_ 7y ago
  Funnily enough, we just hit a similar issue. I'm part of an environmental group at my workplace, and one of our recent pilots was to get rid of single-use paper cups. It was crazy: despite ample clean ceramic cups being available --and indeed stacked on top of the coffee machine!-- many people defaulted to paper cups, sometimes to the tune of having 5-10 used paper cups on their desk at the end of a day. Anyway, one of the issues that the pilot uncovered was that no-one was loading or unloading the dishwasher: it transpired that everyone thought it was someone else's job. This led to piles of dirty cups and a shortage of clean cups, despite each kitchen area having a dedicated commercial-grade dishwasher. The long-term solution is education - so that people understand that we must all take responsibility for the cleaning together, and to train people how to use the dishwashers. The short-term solution is for each kitchen area to have a couple of colleagues who keep an eye on things. I'm one of them for my floor, and I unexpectedly find it strangely therapeutic to do the dish-washing :)
bubblewrap 7y ago
I'd like to implement some sort of RFID system where workers have to check out coffee mugs with their phones and can be held responsible if they don't end up in the dishwasher (or better, be rewarded if they end up in the dishwasher) :-)
holri 7y ago
Classical management failure of solving a social problem with social measures.
sizzle 7y ago
Why not hire a cleaning crew that does dishes?

cstrat 7y ago

This just hurts to read... It is almost as bad as the somewhat inexplicable growth in bottled water in places where tap water is perfectly acceptable. In fact many of the branded bottles of water are not spring water but bottled tap water.

bsaul 7y ago
this story i keep hearing about tap water beeing just as good as bottle one is really starting to get on my nerves. people don’t spend their money and carry huge loads of water bottles if they can have the equivalent for « free » at home. If they do it’s because the tap water infrastructure (as a whole, up to the kitchen’s tap) alter the taste and quality of the water badly enough, even in the cases where the original source is of comparable quality.
- kristopolous 7y ago
  Then put a $50 filter at the tap and you're good for probably $25,000 of bottled water. It's marketing that drives the preference. That's why most chronic bottled water drinkers I know surround their life with other bullshit irrelevant products. It's the same mechanics
  - bubblewrap 7y ago
    Filters seem like a lot of hassle, though. You have to keep them clean and exchange them on a regular basis. I don't really trust that solution.
    - fifnir 7y ago
      So what's another plastic bottle in the dump right? Someone will figure it out, as long as you don't need to deal with the hassle
      - bubblewrap 7y ago
        In my country, plastic bottles have returnable deposits, so they tend to not end in the dump. There are also glass bottles available. That said, I think plastic can be OK if it is trashed adequately. I don't think my plastic bottles end up in the oceans.
        fifnir 7y ago
        Even if it gets recycled, it's not free. Raw materials need to be collected, processed, and transfered. The bottle-quality plastic has to be created and transfeed to the bottle making factory. The bottles transfered again potentially, filled with water, wrapped in more plastic, transfered again.... all that before recycling.
        bubblewrap 7y ago
        Filters are also not free.
        kristopolous 7y ago
        Sure we aren't at zero yet. But dropping the ecological footprint by 99% is a good first step.
    - kristopolous 7y ago
      Many under-sink filtration systems last at least 10,000 gallons. They take 5 minutes max to replace. Are you saying that 5 minute task every few years is more work then manually lugging 10,000 gallons of water through say, 10,000 separate containers, carrying each one, opening them manually each time, tipping and pouring them, then discarding them? (that's the weight of about 25 cars) Not to be rude but I don't believe you.
  - xorfish 7y ago
    How do you spend $25'000 on bottled water? Where I'm from it costs 16.5 cents per liter. That includes a 2 cent tax for recycling the PET Bottle. $25'000 is more than you need in several lifetimes. But then again, tab water here is excellent and also cool. So I don't see a reason why I should transport bottled water. It is much more convenient and cheaper.
    - kristopolous 7y ago
      There's not very expensive filtration systems rated for 100,000 gallons. The standard kirkland bottled water you see in the US in the standard 80 unit packs would run you $195,000 for that. Municipal water would be about $1,500 for that + $150 filter. It's a 99.2% cheaper option. Oh right and the 1.6 million water bottles you'd not have produced, right.
    - maccard 7y ago
      > How do you spend $25'000 on bottled water? Where I'm from it costs 16.5 cents per liter. That includes a 2 cent tax for recycling the PET Bottle. Many people drinking bottled water aren't drinking the cheapest in the supermarket - the recycling bin outside my flat is regularly filled with 1.5l evian bottles - they're £1 each in the local shop. At one bottle a day, that's ~35 person-years. Not common, but not insane. However, my office has 17 people on my floor. If everyone here drank one bottle of it a day, we'd hit it in 2 years.
      - vonmoltke 7y ago
        > Many people drinking bottled water aren't drinking the cheapest in the supermarket - the recycling bin outside my flat is regularly filled with 1.5l evian bottles - they're £1 each in the local shop. At one bottle a day, that's ~35 person-years. Not common, but not insane. Even given expensive name brand water, a $50 filter cartridge only lasts for six months. That's $3150 for the same period. $50 replacing $25,000 is not grounded in reality.
- acchow 7y ago
  Plenty of people do it out of laziness or perception of quality.
- cstrat 7y ago
  Fair enough that not all tap water is created equally. I live in Australia (Sydney) and tap water tastes fine to most (obviously a very subjective thing). To be honest, the argument for bottled water (I incorrectly thought) was more due to the convenience factor rather the taste. Clearly there are other points to consider.
  - shard972 7y ago
    Then you don't live in perth where their water is measurably different to east coast water just by it's unusually high alkaline.
- collyw 7y ago
  They do. In Scotland the tap water is really good (unlike where I live now). There are still large sections of the supermarket with bottled water.
  - gambiting 7y ago
    Pretty much anywhere you go outside of larger cities in Scotland(if you like outdoorsy stuff like I do) has warnings that tap water is supplied directly from the nearest stream/river/lake and is unsafe to drink untreated. I'm perfectly happy to drink tap water nearly anywhere in the UK but any time we go camping in Scotland bottled water is a must because safe tap water is a rarity.
    - peterbraden 7y ago
      This is nonsense, I grew up in Scotland and travelled widely and I’ve never seen such a notice.
      - kawsper 7y ago
        Not Scotland, but I've travelled a lot in Wales, and most, if not all, of the cottages we have rented have had these notices.
      - gambiting 7y ago
        Stayed up in Glencoe literally 2 months ago and these notices were everywhere. Same when we camped next to Loch Ness, Loch Lomond and in Cairngorms.
      - jnty 7y ago
        I've seen the 'private supply' notices but I've never seen them say that water should be treated first (nor have I ever had problems with not.) It's disappointing if they're starting to do this in a blanket fashion.
    - arethuza 7y ago
      I guess it's possible that such places exist that have a private water supply - but in general tap water in Scotland is perfectly safe and tastes lovely. I've certainly never seen a sign anywhere in Scotland that warns about the tap water not being safe.
- scotty79 7y ago
  > If they do it’s because the tap water infrastructure (as a whole, up to the kitchen’s tap) alter the taste and quality of the water badly enough... That's not it. People don't drink tap water because they don't believe it's safe. People who don't drink tap water usually have no trouble drinking it after it's boiled. And non carbonated bottled water tastes just like tap water and you couldn't tell the two apart if there were from taps and brands you are not familiar with.
  - lsc 7y ago
    I am pretty sure that you could tell the difference between a brand of water that is distilled + minerals added and a brand of water that was not distilled in a blind taste test, especially if you drink mostly water. I think there are even pretty big differences, say, between the tap water in Santa Clara and the tap water in Milpitas, for example. I mean, If your argument is that bottled water is wasteful, I'm not disagreeing, but I am saying that if you drink mostly water, even pretty small differences in the mineral content make detectible differences in taste.
    - woodpanel 7y ago
      "if you drink mostly water, even pretty small differences in the mineral content make detectible differences in taste" absolutely. in the european cities where i lived, you could sometimes tell to which aquifer a household is connected. Depending on the neighborhood some need to clean their bathroom appliances from chalk twice as often.
    - lazerwalker 7y ago
      I recall doing a science project in middle school where I did double-blind taste tests of tap water with a half-dozen brands of bottled water (in a place with decent-tasting tap water, FWIW). IIRC, people showed no statistically significant preference for Evian or other fancy bottled water over the local tap water. That isn't to say that there's no taste difference, but that preferring a specific brand of bottled water is likely to be much more about the subconscious effect of marketing than something a priori more enjoyable about the mineral content of a specific brand.
- vidarh 7y ago
  A few years ago I worked in an office where people had kept refilling filter jugs for years, and I just started using the tap because the filter was too slow and annoying. Took a few weeks and everyone had stopped using the filter - all it took was seeing someone else drink water from the tap, and gradually people would do the same I did and drink from the tap when the jug was empty and realize it tasted perfectly fine. Probably better than the filter, frankly - I don't want to think about how rarely that filter was replaced and the jug washed. Point being that while some places do have awful tap water, a lot of people just drink bottled or filtered water because they see people drink bottled or filtered water and copy that without even stopping to consider if their tap water is good enough or not.
- Veen 7y ago
  It is just as good as tap water when it is tap water. https://www.ecowatch.com/bottled-water-sources-tap-2537510642.html https://www.ecowatch.com/bottled-water-sources-tap-253751064...
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
  My chemistry teacher reports that she has issues when she drinks the city water because something something surgically-removed kidney stones. You might also have to modify the chemical makeup of the tap water itself. Personally, I drink tap, but that's mostly because someone won't hook up the fridge (and nobody else in the family likes ice, for some reason.)
rjf72 7y ago
To take things from a different perspective, I find people judging what others ought consider acceptable to be inexplicable. I find people buying $200 sneakers that offer no significant performance improvement over much cheaper alternatives to be 'inexplicable.' I find people buying $1000 phones when a $200 phone would perform literally 100% of a purchaser's tasks to 100% acceptability, to be 'inexplicable'. I even find people buying new cars 'inexplicable' given their hyper-depreciation - meaning a lightly used car is generally a vastly better value. Of course I put 'inexplicable' in single quotes because these things are all completely explicable. Personal choice is a right of every person in a free society, and people have different views and values. And my examples understate the relevance of this as this choice is far more significant, and frequently personal, when it comes to what people consume than whatever stuff people buy for image crafting.
- hyperbovine 7y ago
  I’m with you all the way, so long as externalities are priced in.
  - jnty 7y ago
    This is getting closer to a solution but it assumes that damage is totally reversible given money. If you punch me and break my nose, I can sue you for 'damages' (loss of earnings, medical expenses etc) and in the eyes of civil law everything is OK - but really it would be much better if it hadn't happened in the first place! We recognise that by placing a blanket criminal ban on assault, and in the future I think we're going to have to accept that a lot more for negative-externality actions.
    - hyperbovine 7y ago
      > We recognise that by placing a blanket criminal ban on assault, and in the future I think we're going to have to accept that a lot more for negative-externality actions. But we don't. Rather, we make the price of engaging in that activity extremely high. What would be closest to what you are advocating would be something like summary execution for all cases of homicide and rape, and no civilized country does that.
chronogram 7y ago
Tap water here in the Netherlands is excellent, and I’d much prefer it over bottled water, but that’s only available in places where you’d take your jacket off: home, friends, work, school, hairdresser and the likes. If you’re going somewhere you can bring water or buy water in bottles, but I’ve never seen other ways of getting water.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  That's one thing that's changed since my childhood. As a kid, here in the UK, most schools, public buildings and towns (in the street) had drinking fountains. Most town centres, shopping areas, tourist spots etc had them. Quite often they had a way to fill a bottle too. In the eighties they died out, and you'll rarely to never see one today. Why? They certainly weren't unsafe. Bottled water producers seem to have managed to put people off our overwhelmingly safe tap water and drinking fountains. Now tap is seen as second rate somehow. Put in a vending machine instead, etc. Drinking fountains in schools and streets are long gone. So now everyone can buy a Coke or bottled water, complete with single use plastic, and we mistakenly call that progress. The same people seem fine using tap water for tea, ice, juice etc. Yet another bit of progress that baffles me. :)
  - iamphilrae 7y ago
    I remember mentioning this in a comment thread on Instagram. One response came from someone in the UK who said something along the lines of... “It has been scientifically proven that our water contains high concentrations of cocaine, heroin and other drugs. That’s why I will only drink bottled water.” facepalm I remember in the 80’s when travelling to Europe, whether you could drink the tap water was always a question to ask at the start of the holiday. 30 years later, we are now questioning our own tap water even though the rest of the EU and America have caught up, with water quality that is on par with anything that could be purchased in a bottle.
  - mrguyorama 7y ago
    Here in a small American city, fountains are seemingly coming back into vogue
petre 7y ago
We have a filter. Although tap water is clean it retains chlorine and pipe scaling impurities. Bottled water was found to contain microplastics.

8_hours_ago 7y ago

I feel like dirty dishes have been a problem in every place I have worked. Have any companies wised up and installed a dishwasher in each kitchen, and have someone assigned to run them every night? Or even just pay someone to wash the dishes by hand?

cstrat 7y ago
We've got a dishwasher in each office, and the office manager/reception tidy up. Most people put their own plates away. However like with litter and graffiti in the streets, if people let even a small amount of cups & plates build up - then everyone seems to think it's time to dump their stuff in the sink too.
slavik81 7y ago
I worked in an office with company mugs and a pair of dishwashers. It was great. We had no problems at all.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  Ohhh, the perfect alternating clean dishwasher and dirty dishwasher approach so you never have to queue with the sink or cabinets. My dream home will have 2 dishwashers for that reason.
  - skookumchuck 7y ago
    Even better is to have the kitchen cabinets accept dishwasher racks. Then clearing out the dishwasher is simple. You need 3 racks (and one dishwasher): Rack 1: in the dishwasher being washed Rack 2: in the cabinet of clean dishes Rack 3: set out to be filled with dirty dishes Cheaper than an extra dishwasher!
  - masto 7y ago
    We got one of these. It's been great. https://www.fisherpaykel.com/us/kitchen/dish-washers/dishdrawer/24-double-dishdrawer1.DD24DAX9_N.html https://www.fisherpaykel.com/us/kitchen/dish-washers/dishdra...

rvp-x 7y ago

I've worked at places that had a fridge where people stored their boxed meals, and they had a rule that the fridge is emptied (to the garbage) on the weekend, to avoid accumulating people's forgotten rotting food. Seems like it can be applied to cups as well.

mrbonner 7y ago

At my workplace there are occasions when some people just push their own glasses, cups or bottle waters up touching the nozzle. It is so unsanitary. When we have the disposable cups this kind of issue wouldn’t happen.

verelo 7y ago
"It is so unsanitary." Is it really that bad? As in, so bad it justifies the amount of waste the alternatives produce? I'm sure it's not the worst thing you deal with on a daily basis i.e. door handles are pretty gross.
- Stratoscope 7y ago
  > door handles are pretty gross. Indeed they are. I am probably weird, but when I walk into our building I have a paper towel in my hand to grab the door handle. In fact there are two door handles, one from the parking lot and one into the building, so I use one side of the paper towel first, then fold it in half with a clean side on the outside and use that for the building door handle. Similarly at the cafeteria. I use a "clean hand, dirty hand" system there. My right hand gets dirty handling shared serving utensils, while my left hand stays clean handling fresh plates and such. And then before I eat I find a way to inconspicuously wash my dirty hand. Especially when I've gone to the salad bar and gotten icky sticky salad dressing on my dirty hand. Now that is gross. Weird? For sure. But at the age of 67 my immune system is probably not as good as it was when I was 20-something. It's been working so far. I seem to be one of the few people in the office who hasn't been out with a bad cold this year. Yes, those paper towels are pure waste. I toss them in the compost bin, and I'm grateful to have used them. Edit: if any of the multiple downvoters could mention what they objected to here, I would be genuinely grateful for the feedback so I can do a better job with my comments. Or if it's something I should have figured out on my own, I will do my best to sort it out. :-) Thanks!
  - sumedh 7y ago
    > I seem to be one of the few people in the office who hasn't been out with a bad cold this year. Probably because your immune system is good?

partiallypro 7y ago

This same thing is unfolding in my office. They are getting rid of paper cups but no one washes their dishes. I don't understand what's wrong with paper cups? They are biodegradable.

bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
If they have a plastic lining on the inside (for waterproofing) then they’re not
- ihuman 7y ago
  According to the article they are, but only if you have a machine to separate the wax lining.
  - manicdee 7y ago
    If you have the machine, and the cup is in pristine condition (ie: hasn’t been used). Outside those conditions, “disposable” coffee cups of all types lead to long-term pollution.
  - Steve44 7y ago
    The standard paper coffee cups are about 92% paper and 8% PE for the waterproof lining. Come compostable cups have a lining made from a form of PLA and are, in theory, compostable under the right commercial conditions. The PE lined cups can be recycled, the UK currently has capacity to recycle all the 2.5 billion cups we use annually.
megaremote 7y ago
They are still a huge waste, even if they are biodegradable.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Biodegradable materials get reabsorbed by the environment by definition. They're also recycleable. For instance, cardboard breaks down within two months.

fouc 7y ago

Interestingly I remember seeing signs at Booster Juice company that talked about why they chose to keep using styrofoam cups for environmental reasons. Because the carbon footprint of producing non-styrofoam cups was apparently much higher.

prennert 7y ago
That seems like they are optimising for a too narrow cost function. Carbon emissions are only part of the environment impact.
maccard 7y ago
Than single use paper cups yes, the energy required is much higher. Unfortunately they're not comparing against reusable cups. A reusable glasscup breaks even in terms of energy vs a styrofoam at ~50 re uses. That doesn't price in the lifetime cost of disposing of the styrofoam, and glass is pretty much inert. [0] https://terngoods.com/blogs/learn/cups-single-use-disposable-vs-reusable-an-honest-comparison https://terngoods.com/blogs/learn/cups-single-use-disposable...

01100011 7y ago

What's wrong with styrofoam, assuming it is disposed of properly? Does it cause problems when tossed into a landfill? I think styrofoam is actually pretty good, per unit of source material, because it is expanded so much.

zone411 7y ago
https://sustainability.wustl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Impacts-of-Styrofoam.pdf https://sustainability.wustl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/... Styrofoam for single-use products has been banned in NYC already.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Can you produce a less fanatical source? This PDF spuriously links styrofoam to Parkinson's disease. As I've seen vaccinations blamed for autism, I'm going to disregard this source as reliable.
  - zone411 7y ago
    You're right, not a good source. Google does a poor job of bringing up unbiased soruces. A better term to search for is expanded polystyrene foam. Here are some sources: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33334994 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33334994 https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/aug/27/styrene-carcinogen-brands-polystyrene-foam-food-packaging https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/aug/27... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polystyrene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polystyrene https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-12299-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-12299-2 The EU has decided to ban throwaway polystyrene foam but I don't know if this counts for much as I don't know how much science was taken into account. There will be a comprehensive risk assessment by the EPA: https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-tsca/risk-evaluation-cyclic-aliphatic-bromide-cluster-hbcd https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-t.... My worry is when packaging EPS breaks down into tiny particles that could be inhaled. This cannot be great.
deleted 7y ago
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ip26 7y ago

Are they communal cups? At my office, everyone has their own cup. Perhaps as a happy side effect, there are automatically zero mugs lying around anywhere, because if you leave your mug somewhere then what are you going to put your coffee in? Additionally since most people have a unique cup, other people will recognize yours and try to return it if you misplaced it.

village-idiot 7y ago

Do they not hire adults? That’s disgusting.

iscrewyou 7y ago

Styrofoam cups...for coffee. I can't even. People rather use those than wash reusable ones? I find it fascinating.

antris 7y ago

This is a very logical result when there's no tax related to the environmental effect. Doing this should be so expensive that the option wouldn't be considered. Or then they do it anyway and pay huge taxes for it, paying their share of the recycling / cleaning up.

scotty79 7y ago

My office had a lot of ceramic cups that were taken by employees from the cabinet, used and left wherever in the kitchenette. There was one dedicated employee whose main job was to gather the cups and put them in the dishwasher and after they are cleaned, put them back in the cabinet. Dishwasher ran constantly and that employee kept kitchenette neat in between of cup handling. I think there were even two dishwashers so one can be loaded while the other is working. The system was pretty much perfect. If people forgot to bring their cups back to kitchenette they were gathered by the cleaners at the end of the day from employees desks.

saiya-jin 7y ago
these kind of jobs are cut first when troubles come to the company... and so everybody literally feels we're in trouble
- notyourwork 7y ago
  There’s always a first to cut job in every business.
mft_ 7y ago
Funnily enough, we just hit a similar issue. I'm part of an environmental group at my workplace, and one of our recent pilots was to get rid of single-use paper cups. It was crazy: despite ample clean ceramic cups being available --and indeed stacked on top of the coffee machine!-- many people defaulted to paper cups, sometimes to the tune of having 5-10 used paper cups on their desk at the end of a day. Anyway, one of the issues that the pilot uncovered was that no-one was loading or unloading the dishwasher: it transpired that everyone thought it was someone else's job. This led to piles of dirty cups and a shortage of clean cups, despite each kitchen area having a dedicated commercial-grade dishwasher. The long-term solution is education - so that people understand that we must all take responsibility for the cleaning together, and to train people how to use the dishwashers. The short-term solution is for each kitchen area to have a couple of colleagues who keep an eye on things. I'm one of them for my floor, and I unexpectedly find it strangely therapeutic to do the dish-washing :)

bubblewrap 7y ago

I'd like to implement some sort of RFID system where workers have to check out coffee mugs with their phones and can be held responsible if they don't end up in the dishwasher (or better, be rewarded if they end up in the dishwasher) :-)

holri 7y ago

Classical management failure of solving a social problem with social measures.

sizzle 7y ago

Why not hire a cleaning crew that does dishes?