August
2008
What’s Up With the Paper Cup?
I’ve been a dunce about the paper cup. While others have been carrying their reusable cups into coffee shops the past few years, I rarely have. The perceived paper cups’ biodegradability snookered some of us into thinking it was so much better than Styrofoam, and it’s paper and that’s organic, so what’s the problem?
Here are a few things we all should know: 
- Recycled material makes up only a small percentage of a paper cup, mostly it’s wood chips. Trees, many trees, are needed.
- A lot of electricity and water, and then chemicals in the form of plastic are necessary to make a paper cup, many times more than what is required to make a Styrofoam cup. We caught on to those a long time ago and are aware that they take centuries to biodegrade. We now need to be just as savvy with the paper cup, which is a glutton at the production end.
- We’re now ‘consuming’ several billion paper cups in the U.S. each year (Starbucks alone accounts for over 2.3 billion), landfills are overwhelmed with this bulk, and we now know that it isn’t simply paper that’s decomposing. It’s not such a clean process.
- During the process of biodegrading methane is created, a substance far more environmentally damaging than carbon dioxide.
I urge you to check out this website, Sustainability is Sexy which has the complete scoop, well organized and succinct information about the paper cup.
Our comfort with having our hot beverages delivered in a nice paper cup is analogous to the disposable chopsticks issue in China. NPR featured an interesting piece a few months ago called Bring Your Own Chopsticks. They reported that in China a one-hundred acre forest is required to produce enough disposable chopsticks for one day. Like we Americans with our paper cups, the Chinese have become accustomed to the convenience, with little regard for the environmental cost. There’s a campaign in China now to change the disposable chopsticks practice. As you can imagine there are mixed reviews from the public there who like the convenience of the take-away, disposable chopstick. Sound familiar?
So many conveniences become habits that are taken for granted. Sometimes environmentally sensitive, sustainably oriented people don’t think about common practices like paper cup use that are, collectively speaking, unbelievably toxic. A new sense of frugality is needed, new habits formed and the unimagined secondary benefits of living sustainably will surprise us, I think. Find your reusable coffee cup and carry it with you like the canvas bags we’re now using for groceries. Denounce the paper cup and spread the word.
This table, again at Sustainability is Sexy site, is easy to read and shows paper cup use in relation to wood consumed, resources wasted, and solid waste created.
from Wikipedia: Paper cups have an environmental impact. Although the cups themselves are made from renewable resources (wood chips), paper cups actually consume more non-renewable resources in their manufacture than cups made of polystyrene foam, since converting the wood chips to paper pulp requires energy. During their life cycle, the only significant effluent of polystyrene cups is pentane. In contrast, the manufacture of paper requires several inorganic chemicals and creates large amounts of water effluents. Similarly, recycling polystyrene cups has less impact than recycling paper cups. Paper cups are, however, more biodegradable than polystyrene cups, with the caveat that in an anaerobic landfill paper cups will generally remain undegraded for a long time.[8][9]
A number of cities, e.g. Portland, Oregon in 2003, have banned styrofoam cups and required the use of paper ones in take-out and fast food restaurants.[10]
This is a summertime curtain call for a previous post.