Why don’t you sell foam cups you ask?

We don’t sell foam cups (EPS – expanded polystyrene) for a couple of reasons. These EPS cups are very bulky, on a standard pallet we can fit roughly 5000 foam cups compared with 72,000 Paper Cups!

The product does not stack/nestle inside each other very well and the box they are contained in is mostly full of fresh air!

It costs the same amount of money and uses up the same amount of fuel to move a box containing fresh air as it does one containing paper cups. Ever increasing transport costs will soon spell the end of these products.

Another problem with foam cups is that they will not (ever) decompose and they break up into nice throat blocking sized pieces when discarded. Unfortunately these small foam pieces look like attractive foodstuffs to many small animals L

Paper Cups, although most do have a plastic laminate on the inside to keep liquids from soaking into the paper will not do this, and will eventually break down although the time taken to do so can be great.

Now all aboard the Anya Hindmarch bandwagon…

I have seen on a couple of websites ceramic ‘I am not a paper cup’

cups for use in coffee shops instead of paper cups, marketed on the idea that these cups are ‘greener’.

Now I have blogged quite a bit about green issues and there are lots of them when you work in the catering disposables ‘single use’ industry.

I will say this however, I doubt that once these products  are shipped in their plastic individually boxed containers to your door that any benefits gained in their supposed repeated use is lost when you consider that 1000 paper cups could have been moved using the same amount of energy/fuel. The energy used to create these cups is massive too.

You'd have to use the ceramic cup 640 times before it would equal a polystyrene cup and 294 times to equal a paper cup.

Personally I believe Coffee is sold in Starbucks et al because it is convenient, not because the coffee is any better than we drink at home.

If you are going to bring with you a ceramic cup to Starbucks you may as well go the whole hog and take a flask with coffee in it instead and not bother!

Wallet-Check, Watch-Check, Keys-Check, Mug?- afraid so.