The coffee to go debacle – part 2
I stumbled across this article this morning, which provides an interesting point in the debate about coffee cups. The article’s in German, you can find it on the FAZ website here.
The gist of it is, that there aren’t actually any studies analysing how many resources the alternatives to your plastic-coated throw-away paper cups actually consume. Apparently, the production of paper cups produces 38.000 tons of CO2 each year in Germany, but it’s not clear what happens to that number when you replace the paper cups with say ceramic or porcelain cups.
There seems to only be one study that does the comparison, but it’s 10 years old and on top of that had been commissioned by the paper cup industry in the Netherlands. They assumed that someone would use a ceramics cup twice a day for 5 years, and compared the resources used to someone using a paper cup under the same circumstances. Perhaps surprisingly, the paper cup won – if you assume that the ceramics cup is being washed out after every use, because hot water costs a lot of energy. Only if you wash out the ceramics cup only every other time you use it (which you can do in the office but not in Starbucks because they’ll only accept it if it’s clean apparently) does it become a valid alternative.
So what’s the bottom line here? Merrily use paper cups? Shun Starbucks and never wash up again? Maybe try rinsing the cup with cold water? You decide!
Author’s contribution to using fewer resources