In the U.S. alone, about 50 billion coffee cups get thrown away each year. In theory, bringing a reusable cup with you whenever you buy coffee would combat the excess waste produced by single-use products, but does it?
Disposable paper coffee cups (which are lined with plastic film and can't be recycled) degrade after about 30 years, and plastic cups can take more than 400 years to decompose, according to the World Wildlife Foundation.
Thankfully, it doesn't take long for a reusable cup to reach its break-even point, which is the number of times you have to use the product for it to have less environmental impact than its single-use counterpart, according to a report from Upstream Solutions, a nongovernmental organization that promotes reusable products.
You need to use a glass cup 36 times, a stainless steel cup 35 times and a reusable plastic cup only 20 times to outweigh the impacts of using plastic-lined disposable paper cups. Every use after that is better for the environment.
Plus, while 500 disposable cups require about 370 gallons of water to produce, washing a reusable cup 500 times only uses about 53 gallons of water, Upstream reports.
Still, Spokane hasn't made a huge shift in that direction yet.
"I've been seeing an uptick," says Rocket Bakery barista Jack Gassen, when asked how often people bring reusable cups. "But it's only like a couple people an hour, I'd say." ♦
