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The Berkeley People's Republic of California is proud of its civic and environmental leadership. The small liberal town east of San Francisco was one of the first American cities to adopt curbside recycling. He banned styrofoam and was about to take plastic bags. Earlier this year, Berkeley City Council announced a new environmental scourge: the take-away coffee mug.
Some 40 million disposable cups are thrown into the city every year, according to city council, or nearly one per capita per day. For example, in January, the city said it would require cafés to charge 25 cents more for customers who use a take-away cup. "Waiting is no longer an option," said Sophie Hahn, a Berkeley city council member who drafted the legislation.
Burdened by garbage, jurisdictions around the world prohibit single-use take-away plastic cups and cups. According to Europe, plastic cups must disappear before 2021. India wants them out before 2022. Taiwan has set a deadline of 2030. Supplements such as Berkeley will probably be more and more common to try to change quickly the consumer behavior before new bans.
For chains like Starbucks, which processes about 6 billion cups a year, this is no less than an existential dilemma. Dunkin 'has recently changed its name to minimize the origin of its donut and now earns nearly 70% of its revenue from coffee beverages. But it's also an urgent problem for McDonald's and the fast food industry as a whole.
The executives have long suspected that this day would come. Together, they have been working for more than a decade on a more environmentally friendly alternative to a plastic lined paper cup with a double wall and a plastic lid.
It did not go very well.
"It affects me a lot," said Scott Murphy, director of operations at Dunkin 'Brands Group, which processes 1 billion cups of coffee a year. He has been working on the redesign of the chain since it committed to stop using foam in 2010. This year, its stores are finally moving to paper cups and continue to tinker with new materials and designs.
"It's a bit more complicated than people think," says Murphy. "This cup is in a way the most intimate interaction with our consumer. It's a big part of our brand and our heritage. "
Disposable cups are a relatively modern invention. About 100 years ago, public health advocates were eager to ban another type of cup: the public drinking container, a shared tumbler or a glass goblet left near the fountains. When Lawrence Luellen patented a disposable cup lined with wax, he introduced it as an innovation in hygiene, a prophylactic measure to combat diseases such as pneumonia and tuberculosis.
The take-out coffee crop emerged only much later. McDonald's launched breakfast nationwide in the late 1970s. A little more than a decade later, Starbucks opened its 50th store. According to BTIG analyst Peter Saleh, they currently sell nearly $ 20 billion worth of coffee a year.
In the meantime, companies like Georgia-Pacific and International Paper have grown in line with the $ 12 billion disposable cup market in 2016. By 2026, this number is expected to be close to $ 20 billion.
The United States consumes about 120 billion cups of paper, plastic and foam coffee each year, about one-fifth of the world's total. Almost every one of them – 99.75% – ends up in garbage, where even paper cups can take more than 20 years to decompose.
A wave of bans on plastic bags has inspired new efforts to reduce cup waste. Food and beverage containers are a much bigger problem because they sometimes generate 20 times more waste than plastic bags. But going back to reusable cloth bags is relatively easy. With the takeaway coffee mugs, there is no simple alternative. Berkeley encourages residents to bring a travel mug, and Starbucks and Dunkin 'give discounts to those who do.
Cafes know that reusable cups are a good solution, but for now, in franchises, they can be a "nightmare", says Dunkin's Murphy. Servers never know if a cup is dirty or need to wash it, and it's hard to know how much coffee to fill in a large cup.
Ten years ago, Starbucks was committed to serving up to 25% of its coffee in personal travel mugs. Since then, he has significantly reduced his goals. The company offers a discount to anyone bringing their own cup, but only about 5% of customers do so. It temporarily added a 5pc surcharge to disposable cups in the UK last year, indicating increased use of reusable cups by 150%.
Businesses continue to work on a better cup.
It took Dunkin 'nine years to find an alternative to his signature foam mug. A first attempt required new lids, difficult to recycle. Prototypes made from 100% recycled materials were buckled and tipped at the bottom. A mushroom cup promised to decompose easily, but it was too expensive to enlarge on a large scale.
The chain was finally installed on a plastic lined paper cup lined with plastic, thick enough to protect the hands from it without an outer sleeve and compatible with existing lids. They are made from ethical paper and biodegrade faster than foam, but that's about it – they are more expensive to manufacture and are not recyclable in most places.
Paper cups are notoriously difficult to recycle. Recyclers are concerned that plastic seals will cover their machines and almost always send them to the trash. Three "batch pulper" machines in North America are able to separate the plastic coating from the paper.
While cities can improve recycling on a large scale, about one in 25 cups of coffee could be recycled in just a few years, compared to one in 400, according to the UK paper cup recovery and recycling group. It's a big "if". Consumers generally throw their coffee cups on their plastic lids, which they then have to separate before they can be recycled separately.
Dunkin 'says he works with the municipalities to make sure the recyclable cups are really recyclable. "It's a trip – I do not think it'll ever be over," says Dunkin's Murphy. McDonald's recently partnered with Starbucks and other fast-food restaurants to support the $ 10 million NextGen Cup Challenge, a "moon stroke" to develop, accelerate and resize a more sustainable cup. In February, the contest announced 12 winners, including compostable and recyclable cardboard cups, the development of an internal herbal lining that can contain liquids and programs to encourage the use of reusable cups.
"We are looking for commercially viable solutions in the short term and ambitious goals," said Bridget Croke, vice president of external affairs at Closed Loop Partners, a recycling-focused investment firm that manages the challenge.
A cup that can break down more quickly would be a solution – the European ban makes an exception for compostable cups that disintegrate in 12 weeks – but even if such a cup was readily available and cost-effective, the United States does not. They do not have enough composting facilities to break them down. In this case, they go to landfills where they will not decompose at all.
At its annual meeting in 2018, Starbucks quietly tested a coffee cup made from recycled pieces of other coffee cups, widely considered the Holy Grail of the coffee cup. It was an art of performance, more than anything else: in order to organize the limited run, the coffee chain collected trucks loaded with goblets and sent them to a Sustana pulper in Wisconsin for treatment. From there, the fibers were sent to a WestRock paper mill in Texas to be turned into cups on which another company printed the logos. Although the resulting cut was better for the environment, the process used to make it was certainly not. "There is a big engineering challenge here," said Croke of Closed Loop. "It was clear that the solutions that companies were working on to solve this problem had not been fast enough."
So governments like Berkeley are not waiting. The municipality investigated the inhabitants before imposing this charge and discovered that it would convince more than 70% of them to bring their own cups with the surcharge of 25 cents, a said Miriam Gordon, program director of the non-profit group Upstream, who helped Berkeley draft legislation.
The accusation is supposed to be an experience of human behavior rather than a traditional tax. Berkeley's cafes keep the extra costs and can even lower their prices so that the price to be paid by the consumer remains the same. They simply need to clarify that there is a supplement. "It must be visible to the customer," said Gordon. "That's what motivates people to change their behavior."
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With the help of Bloomberg's Leslie Patton.
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