Starbucks Trash Talk

Coffee Cup Trash Talk

Chances are good you’ve had a cup of coffee to go a time or two in your life.  Actually, according to statistics that recently stated coffee shops to be the fastest growing segment in the entire restaurant business and that Americans are now drinking 400 million cups of coffee a day, it’s likely that you’ve had a cup to go more than once or twice.  To put it more bluntly: if we, as Americans, consume 400 million cups of coffee, then we are consuming some 146,000,000,0000 (146 billion) cups of coffee per year. Now, put that in terms of coffee consumed in disposable cups, and we can get a pretty sickening figure. According to the Recycler’s Handbook, we throw away 25 million Styrofoam cups a year.  (Also, Styrofoam happens to be the worst, because they never break down, which means 1,000 years from now, your coffee cup from this morning will still be sitting in some landfill.)

Not scared yet?  Consider these numbers:

Projected for 2010:

Number of disposable cups to be used in the U.S. alone:      23 billion

Tons of wood consumed for those cups:                                1.4 million

Number of trees cut down:                                                     9.4 million

BTU’s of energy used:                                                            7 trillion

Gallons of water used:                                                            5.7 billion

Pounds of solid waste created:                                               263 million

(Data retrieved from: Sustainability Is Sexy)

Those figures are staggering, any way you look at them.  The main problem lies in the fact that your ordinary coffee cups are never made with recycled paper.  This primarily has to do with FDA regulations that don’t allow for recycled paper to be in contact with beverages.  Secondly, recycled paper doesn’t hold up well to liquid, especially hot liquid.  The third problem: coffee cups are covered in a thin plastic called polyethylene, which is great for keeping your coffee cup from leaking on the way from Starbucks to work, but not so great since polyethylene isn’t recyclable.  So, not only is the cup itself not created with recycled paper, it’s also not recyclable when it’s used.

The future looks bleak, doesn’t it?  It doesn’t necessarily have to.  Starbucks is, right now, working on creating 100% reusable or recyclable cups, and since they’re one of the leading contributors to accumulating wasted cups, their change alone could drastically improve those figures.  And, you can do your own part.  At the very least, stop buying your coffee in to-go-cups.  Ask for a coffee mug if that’s an option, or start taking your own.  Some coffee shops will even give you a discount for bringing in your own thermos, and if they don’t already have that in place, see if you can speak to the owner/manager about starting an incentive program. 

And remember, you can always make your own coffee at home. This makes things easier and better for recycling all around.  You can use fair-trade green coffee, pour the coffee into your own mug, and then recycle your coffee grounds out in the backyard. 

 Photo credit: © GreenvilleDailyPhoto.com

 Author Tara Alley is a freelance writer who enjoys blogging and writing about finding creative ways to live more sustainably.  You can follow her on Twitter @hopesiempre.

One Man's Trash

One Man’s Trash… Could Be Your Treasure
3 Rules Of Thrifty Product Sourcing

By Chris Malta & Robin Cowie

Thrift shops and consignment stores can be excellent sources for your product inventory — they always have fresh items to pick through and you can find some great pieces for rock-bottom prices.

• Consignment stores, are commission-based. People bring in products for the store to sell on commission — what doesn’t sell is returned to the owner.

• Thrift stores are often ‘not for profit’ and get most of their goods via donations.

In comparing the two, thrift stores are typically more willing (and able) to bargain with you simply because they have more room to do so.

Online retailers sometimes feel that these types of resale stores are not a good place to find inventory because there’s not enough of a profit margin. But author Kate Holmes, founder of Too Good To Be Threw (http://www.tgtbt.com), disagrees. Holmes asserts, "These stores have a very limited market. If nobody in their town happens to want to buy a pair of Jodhpurs that week, those Jodhpurs will be sitting there waiting for an eBay seller to snap them up.” The end result can be amazing deals on quality items with an online demand.

In addition to a narrow market, Holmes also cites restricted space as a factor in second-hand stores’ bargain pricing. She points out, "They only have so much space, so they can only carry so many things. If they can move an item on and bring something else in, they’re pleased with that.”

3 Rules of Sourcing Products in Thrift and Consignment Shops:

1. Shop the Edges. Even resale stores tend to carry certain types of products. What doesn’t fit a shop’s profile, they usually want to move out quickly. They tend to put these products around the store’s edges, so start there.

2. Shop Often. These stores are constantly turning over product and bringing in new items, so don’t let a dry trip or two discourage you. Your persistence can pay off in a big way.

3. Cultivate Relationships with Shopkeepers. If they like you, they’ll be much more willing to give you deals. They may also be more willing to set things aside for you, if they know what you’re looking for, and guide you to items you might have otherwise missed.

If you’re just starting out, a good place to find resale stores is in the Yellow Pages, under either “consignment” or “thrift.” Don’t be afraid to ask shopkeepers if they know of other stores in the area — if they don’t have what you’re looking for, they’ll usually be happy to refer you to someone they think might.

About the Author: Product Sourcing Radio is Created and Hosted by Chris Malta and Rob Cowie of WorldwideBrands.com, Home of OneSource: The Internet's Largest Source of Genuine, Factory-Direct Wholesalers for online sellers. Click Here for FREE E-Biz & Product Sourcing info!

Source: www.isnare.com
Permanent Link: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=66965&ca=Business

What Fills The Landfill?

credit: morcomm@stock.xchangI grew up in a small town back in the time when we still called the local landfill the city dump. We kids knew the dump very well - one of our Saturday chores was to accompany my dad to the dump to help him unload the trash. It smelled to high heaven, but it was also a wonderland of discoveries. You never knew what you'd find at the dump back then - people just threw things out with no concern about biodegradation or decomposition and no worries about how many centuries that plastic cup would sit in the ground before returning to the Earth.

But it was the 1970s, the decade that gave us Earth Day and the Smiley Face. Biodegradeable became a catch word, and people started paying attention to the things that they threw out and the poisons that leached into the earth - and then into our ground water and our water tables. Aside from the toxic wastes, we learned about the things that would not biodegrade, that would live on in the landfills and eventually, if we kept throwing those things out, they would crowd us out of our own planet.

Two things took a high place in that list of horrible, awful things - styrofoam packaging and disposable diapers. They couldn't be recycled and they wouldn't biodegrade. If we didn't do something about them, we would soon be living on mountains of dirty plastic diapers and fast food styrene containers.

And then along came William Rathje. Rathje devised The Garbage Project and is the founder of Garbology - the science of analyzing garbage and learning what it says about people. Rathje's Garbage Project has had some interesting uses over the years, but one of the most interesting was his discovery of how fast things biodegrade - or don't - and what makes up the bulk of our landfills. Digging into dumps in Arizona and the Southwest, Rathje's team found newspapers from the 1970s that could still be read and steak bones with fat and meat still on them. Even worse, they found hot dogs that were pretty much untouched  think about that next time you bite into a ballpark treat.

They also learned that, surprisingly, disposable diapers and expanded foam containers - the kind your Big Mac used to come in - make up a whole lot less of landfill by volume than we'd estimated and assumed. In fact, if you take both together, they make up less than 2% of landfill space by volume OR weight.

So if we're not building up piles of foam packaging (styrofoam peanuts and stereo packagingin included) and dirty diapers, what ARE we filling our landfills with? Are you ready for the answer?

Paper. Especially newspaper. According to Rathje, if we were more diligent about recycling our newspapers and magazines, we could extend the usable life of our landfills by decades. Which is actually pretty darn funny when you think about it, since paper is the one household item that we've had the capacity to recycle the longest. What does it say about us that the items that take up the most space in our landfills are things that we have the easiest capacity to recycle? That they're things that shouldn't ever end up IN a landfill in the first place? Maybe the novelty has worn off?

These days, I live in a big city - one of the first city's in the country to institute regular curbside recycling. Every week, instead of traveling to the dump I put out laundry baskets of unsorted - because they make it so easy for us now - tin cans, glass and plastic bottles and other recycleable items. I almost never put out newspapers and magazines, and most of my paper trash... goes in the trash. All that junk mail and those grocery flyers - I'll be you file them in the round file, too, don't you?

Maybe the answer to reducing some of that paper trash - that doesn't biodegrade, remember? T- is to go back to the old days before recycling, or the early early days of recycling, and hold good old-fahsioned paper drives to heighten awareness of just how much paper we DON'T recycle. What do you think? Would you put all your paper trash in a paper bag and put it out for the Boy Scouts?