It’s the morning after you’ve just pulled an all-nighter writing a paper for your 8 a.m. humanities class and you’re in desperate need of some good strong Starbucks coffee – the college student’s ambrosia.
Feeling like you definitely deserve a treat after last night, you decide to get your caffeine fix in the most ostentatious way possible: a venti caramel frappuccino. It’s 20 ounces of absolute perfection and for a full 10 minutes you’re in gustatory heaven. But before you know it, the divine experience comes to an unwelcomed end, as you try fruitlessly to scrape the last dregs of the whipped cream from the cup with your straw, the frappuccino’s ephemeral flavor slowly fades away. You’re left with a lonely 20-ounce plastic cup, which you promptly chuck into a trash bin on your way to class.
Multiply that one lonely plastic cup by how many times you’ve bought a Starbucks drink, plus the number of other students who buy them and that comes out to … a lot of plastic that ends up in a landfill. Since Starbucks opened up on campus, I’ve noticed how the influx of those mermaid-logoed cups has completely invaded trash bins everywhere. To be honest, it saddens me that something that takes 10 minutes to consume could leave such a long-lived reminder of how humans are relentlessly continuing to trash the planet.
To be fair, I do have to applaud Starbucks for its efforts to make its plastic cups more environmentally friendly by using polypropylene (#5), which creates 45 percent less greenhouse gas in its production than polyethylene (#1) does. While Starbucks is doing its part on the production end of its products’ life cycle, it remains up to the consumer to see that the tail end of a frappuccino goes to a better place. However, #5 plastic is not recyclable on campus (only #1 and #2 can be put in the recycling bins).
In addition, even plastic that does get recycled will eventually find its way into a landfill. Recycle your plastic Starbucks cup and chances are it’s not going to be reborn as a new plastic Starbucks cup. Plastics that get recycled are actually turned into unrecyclable plastic products such as textiles and plastic lumber, due to the fact that the quality of the plastic diminishes as it goes through the recycling process. Not to mention that recycling plastic, just like producing plastic, requires an input of fossil fuel energy.
So what is the environmentally conscious Starbucks lover to do? I’m certainly not going to ask you to sacrifice your coffee – I’m a firm believer that coffee is one of God’s greatest gifts to man. I am, however, going to propose to you a completely reasonable solution to the Starbucks cup dilemma: get yourself over to Wegmans and buy yourself a reusable insulated beverage cup. (If you get the Wegmans brand, they’ll throw in a free first cup of coffee with it!)
With the 10-cent-off discount at Starbucks every time you use your reusable cup, it’ll pay for itself in about a month. Problem solved!