How can we alleviate concerns about reusable cups?

As part of my year-long endeavor to decrease my consumption of single-use plastic, I wrote last week about my attempts to use reusable cups at a variety of local establishments. I’m particularly trying to avoid Styrofoam.

It’s not that difficult to keep a resolution not to use disposable plastic beverage containers. I can do it for myself easily enough. I don’t get drinks at Sonic or Chick-Fil-A, where I can’t use my own cups. (Actually, I just don’t go to Sonic.) Instead, I get the same drink at the Casey’s convenience store down the road (for less money), get a can of Coke Zero from my own fridge, or skip a drink altogether.

Reusable containers in my regular rotation: coffee cup (Thermos), soda cup (Yeti), water bottle (Camelbak).

But it’s more challenging once there are other people involved. My kids take their own water bottles to swim practices, but at meets, parents sign up to bring snacks (and drinks) for the whole team. This means water. Cases of bottled water – which I resolved not to purchase. But while my family supports my choice, they made no such resolution. We could, I suppose, take a 5-gallon cooler of water, and the swimmers could use their own water bottles. But what if they don’t have any? Will we take reusable cups for everyone? And won’t they think we’re weird? Yeah, we’ll be taking the bottled water.

I’ve already learned things from readers of this blog, as I hoped would happen as I began chronicling this experiment. One thing that seriously — literally — hadn’t occurred to me was that there would be people opposed to establishments allowing customers to use reusable cups. So, another barrier to changing the infrastructure to encourage more people to limit their plastic waste is this opposition. I foolishly thought there wouldn’t be any, or rather, I just didn’t think about it.

The main opposition I have received is that people are “grossed out” by the thought of someone else’s unsanitary cup possibly contaminating their own beverage. Or, in the case of the food service workers, of having to touch someone’s unsanitary cup. Here are my paraphrases of things I have heard so far:

• I wouldn’t want someone else’s contaminated cup touching the top of the dispenser.
• Many people don’t clean their cups. I’ve worked in food service, and it’s bad enough having to handle the money they produce with dirty hands or from sweaty bodily locations.
• What if a whole pitcher gets germs from one person’s contaminated cup?

This isn’t a quantitative study, but it seems that there are several who feel this way. I don’t know if they are in the majority, or minority. But the gist of this is that, given the choice, some people would presumably choose not to visit (or work at) an establishment that encourages customers to bring their own cups.

We’re not going back to restaurants that wash dishes. Fast-food and convenience is here to stay. But I just can’t accept that mounds of Styrofoam waste is the only alternative. As I’ve mentioned, there are plenty of places that have serve-yourself drinks or promote the use of reusable cups, but this is not yet the norm. To be fair, the image below is supposed to be showing cups that CFA is sending for recycling. Or actually, “downcycling” into name badges and bench legs.

From a story about how Chick-Fil-A recycles some of their cup waste.

As long as customers prefer (or at least accept) their drinks in Styrofoam, this is the result. I’ve seen it reported that Americans alone discard 25 billion Styrofoam cups per year (or 82 per person). I can’t verify this number, but it seems reasonable.

So, I’m interested in what ideas you have. What studies you know about. How would you go about reducing the single-use plastic waste at restaurants? Are there surveys of public opinion regarding how drinks are dispensed? Do you avoid getting drinks at places where you serve yourself? Are there studies of the cleanliness or bacteria counts of drink dispensers at self-serve versus employee-serve establishments? Is there something that would convince you to support reusable cups instead of disposable?

I’m doing this experiment to raise awareness — including my own awareness. What can you tell me?

Velcro, kleenex, band-aids–styrofoam?

After I wrote last week’s post, I discovered that styrofoam.com is a real website. It redirects to a DuPont product page describing their extruded polystyrene (XPS) “foam board” product used for insulation. It’s a great product. I installed some when I finished my basement many years ago. It’s similar to the craft foam that you can but at hobby stores. Kind of “crunchy” when you squeeze it or push sticks into it.

But this isn’t what comes to mind for most of us when we think of styrofoam. Most of us are thinking of the expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam products used for food and drink containers. You know the ones: every cup at Sonic or Chick-Fil-A, or the clam-shell takeout containers at your favorite Chinese restaurant.

The name Styrofoam^TM is derived from its building block styrene, which in turn, was named after styrax, the resin from the American sweetgum tree, Liquidambar styraciflua, which also contains cinnamaldehyde. Indeed, some styrene can also be found in cinnamon, so you have likely ingested (and enjoyed) consuming it along with your apple pie or snickerdoodle.

I’ve been concerned for some time about how much waste I’ve added to the stream when I’ve had one of my beloved Coke Zeros. I know it doesn’t break down readily. I’ve been to the lake and have seen floating wooden docks built on styrofoam platforms, and while they get dirty, they never seem to degrade. And I know I’ve been thinking about this for a while, because when I looked in my pantry just now, I found four 32-ounce styrofoam cups that I have attempted to reuse and refill, rather than simply buying another one each time. Reduce, reuse, recycle — right?

But aren’t styrofoam cups mostly air? Perhaps, but one 32-ounce styrofoam cup contains as much plastic as a typical “red Solo® cup” — about 8 grams (see photo). The Solo cup is also polystyrene, just without the air blown into it. So both styles of cup contain about the same amount of plastic.

Masses (in grams) of cups I had in my cupboard — three 32-ounce beverage cups from area establishments, and one 16-ounce Solo® cup

Polystyrene of any type can be marked with recycle code 6. But there is no market for recycling polystyrene, and never really has been. My local recycling station doesn’t accept it, and yours probably doesn’t either. And even if it does accept it, it’s likely that the polystyrene still ends up in the landfill.

Now, I try to always use my Yeti® cup that looks like it would hold 32 ounces, but actually holds 24. (I use less ice though, so still get enough Coke Zero.) But this is easier to do at some establishments than at others. Of those represented in the photo above, I have no problem using my own cup at Schlotzsky’s® or Casey’s. Casey’s even gives me a discount. But it’s a no-go at Chick-Fil-A. I tried to reuse that styrofoam Chick-Fil-A cup there once, and the person behind the counter said they couldn’t do that. I barked that I didn’t want a new cup, and she relented — but I don’t think she was supposed to, and look in her eyes said that I might be scaring her a little bit. I decided it would be best if I didn’t try that again, so now I just don’t get a drink when I eat there. (The sandwich comes in a foil-and-paper wrapper, and the fries are in cardboard, so I’ll still be allowed to have those during my 2020 experiment.)

Read the fine print: $20 Chick-Fil-A tumblers — that cannot be used at Chick-Fil-A

It’s ironic, too. During the holiday shopping season, my local CFA was selling reusable, branded CFA cups. But you can’t actually use these cups at Chick-Fil-A. I asked. It’s for hygiene reasons. Mind you, they have no problem refilling the foam cups that you bought on your current visit (“May I refresh your drink?”), so if there were an individual likely to cause issues with cup hygiene at CFA, presumably it only takes effect once the cup leaves the premises.

And it’s hit-or-miss whether a business you might frequent will support your efforts to reduce waste of single-use plastic. Tropical Smoothie has been in town for a year or two. My daughters like to get smoothies there, and one of them even went at 4am to the grand opening of the location closest to our home and stood in line to get free smoothies for a year. At my age, I don’t need that kind of sugar in my diet, but I stopped by a few months back to try one. I brought my Yeti and asked if they could use it. The teenager behind the counter seemed hesitant (“I don’t know if we can do that”) and, having earlier learned my lesson at Chick-Fil-A, I didn’t press the issue. I just took the smoothie in the styrofoam cup.

But my daughter noticed in a social media post before Christmas from a new location in the town next door that they were offering refillable smoothie mugs. When I made my own post about this, a friend replied that the other town next door (in the other direction) offered these all the time. I got in the car and went there that day.

Sure enough, they did, and they even had two styles of “Whirley Mugs,” so I could get one for each of my two kids could and they could tell them apart. And, in case you can’t read the sign in the image, they cost $5 each and you get a 5% discount every time you use it. The young lady who sold them to me even offered that if my girls used them in the drive-through, to let them know that they had a “Whirley Mug.” That way, she said, they could just pour the smoothie directly into the mug rather than having to pour it over from the cup they had already put it into. She gets it.

I’m not sure why this has to be such a struggle.

Today a friend asked me if I thought what I and some others are doing–refusing plastic, reusing, etc.–would really make any difference. Wouldn’t there need to be regulations to discourage plastic use, for example? As our group talked about this over dinner, another said that perhaps if we keep trying, and this evolves into a bit of a movement, while there are at the same time businesses and manufacturers that also are trying to mitigate the problem from the other side, it becomes easier to meet in the middle.

As I researched this post, I found a story that said that Chick-Fil-A ships “[b]ags of used cups… to a special recycling facility… [to] become the legs to benches… [or] writing pens and name badges for employees. ” This is not what I mean. (Click the link to the story to see a photo of a huge pile of styrofoam cups.) Instead, they could simply refuse to contribute to the production of the styrofoam in the first place. They could, at the very least, accommodate customers who desire to use their own reusable cups. Starbucks doesn’t seem to have a “hygiene problem.” They happily put coffee into my cup, and give me a discount. Or they would, if I wanted to spend $5 on a grande nonfat latte more than a few times a year.

Another story I came across had the headline “Maine becomes the first state to ban Styrofoam.” According to the story, ” The law, which will go into effect January 1, 2021, prohibits restaurants, caterers, coffee shops and grocery stores from using the to-go foam containers because they cannot be recycled in Maine. ” That’s a good start, even if the reasoning isn’t quite what I’d hope. Even if styrofoam could be recycled, plastic is simply not truly recyclable in the way that other materials, such as metals or glass, are. But that’s a story for another day.

And not all states will go the way that Maine is. In 2015, according to a Dallas Morning News story, there were at least a dozen Texas cities with bans on single-use plastic bags. Dallas didn’t ban them but attempted to impose a 5-cent fee per bag. In Dallas and in Laredo, businesses sued, backed by lobbying from the plastics industry and others. They won. In 2018, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that bag bans violate the Texas Solid Waste Disposal Act, and all such bans can no longer be enforced.

As for me, I’m making mental note of where I can eat that will allow me to use my refillable cup, and planning to frequent those places more and other places less. It’s all part of the experiment.

How many Rs are there?

As I begin this year-long experiment to avoid single-use plastic, I’ve already discovered the “zero-waste bloggers.” I planned to “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” But a quick search of the interwebs shows me that I’m at least 2 R’s short. Apparently there are at least 5 R’s. But what are they? Duckduckgo showed several options on the first page of resutls. And the final one even has a bonus!

• refuse, reduce, reuse, repurpose, recycle
• reduce, reuse, recycle, refuse, recover
• refuse, reduce, reuse (+repair), recycle, rot

I discovered that I’ve already been working on the “Refuse” part. I’m not going to be “zero-waste,” and that isn’t my target. I’ve already failed at trying to make compost for my garden. How much difference can I make without even making sacrifices (such as refusing things I don’t need anyway) or with minor sacrifices?

Keeping Ziploc® containers in my car allows me to avoid expanded polystyrene (Styrofoam®) takeout containers.

Already this year, only a week in, I’ve succeeded, and I’ve failed. I took my daughter to see a musical in a nearby city. We went out for lunch before the show, and she had some leftovers. I used a container from my car to store them in, negating the need for a disposable takeout box. I’ve been keeping these in my car for some months now. I bring them home, wash them, and return them to the car for the next time they’re needed.

After the show, we went to an early dinner with her friend and his family. The friend’s family bought dinner, and offered to send leftovers home with us. I tried to refuse, weakly. But, not wanting to make a scene, I agreed. So we went home with pizza in an expanded polystyrene container. What’s more, while my daughter and I only ordered water to drink, others ordered sweet tea that arrived in 22-ounce polypropylene cups–one of which my daughter was offered as a “souvenir.”

When I went out for a omelette today, I again put my leftovers in a reusable container from my car. But without thinking, I used two containers of jelly from the table for my toast. It’s so easy to use disposable plastic without even thinking. In this case, I would have had to deny myself the pleasure of mixed-fruit Smuckers in order to eliminate the small amount of plastic waste.

And I still have some of my favorite yogurt in the fridge. I can’t get the Dannon coffee yogurt in the town where I live, so I have bought many of them when I visit a nearby town (note the October date on the package in the photo). This yogurt comes in a disposable polystyrene container, as shown by the “6” code and the letters “PS” on the bottom. I’m still going to eat this yogurt, but when it’s gone, it’s gone, for the duration of this experiment. The experiment is for 2020, but I’m hoping for lasting changes in my habits. I’ll keep you updated on what I have to sacrifice, and where I can find legitimate sustainable alternatives. But I’m gonna miss this yogurt.

It was easy to avoid using foam take-home boxes without sacrificing anything at all, but more challenging to enjoy my jelly or yogurt without throwing plastic in the garbage.

As a trained organic chemist/biochemist, I am not opposed to the manufacture or use of plastic. I recall using polystyrene beads in high-school “shop” to fill molds in steam baths to make storage containers for the clay chess pieces that we (that is, the shop teacher) made. I still have this chess set.

In the next post, I’ll explore the chemistry of polystyrene – where it comes from, and where it goes. And we’ve got many more kinds of plastic to look at on this journey. I’ll try to keep it interesting.