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.
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.
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?
Rhapsodies in vivo 