Trouble with reducing your coffee cup waste

Change is difficult. If you've never tried to make change happen, it can be frustrating, annoying, and at times, hopeless. You keep doing it, in hopes that the reward of seeing the change actually happen will make it worthwhile. The times it has worked, it has been very rewarding. So if you're trying to drive change, keep plugging away. It will happen eventually...

Here's an example of how frustrating it can be. I have been working a lot lately, and staying up late. I need a caffeine fix the next morning, so I go to McDonald's for their caramel iced coffee. I brought in my refillable coffee cup and asked that it be used, instead of a plastic cup (and lid and straw). I hate having a stack of plastic cups in my car, to show me how much coffee I've drank, and how much waste I've generated. I take them home to recycle them, but I'd rather not use them in the first place. The problem I ran into is that the way McDonald's coffee system is setup, the cup defines the right amount of coffee, sugar and caramel (or mocha) mixture. If you remove the cup out of the process, you lose the recipe and consistency.



The manager offered to take my cup and pour the coffee into it (after using their cup to mix it), but I suspected that their cup would have been discarded after use, so would I have gained anything? I guess I could have avoided the use of a straw (they needed the lid to shake and mix the coffee). Frustrating!

I guess my point for this blog is that it takes everyone involved in the whole process to think green and environmentally-friendly in order for change to occur. We as consumers can help drive it, but you will really start to see major changes when the people designing the processes are thinking that way from the beginning. It takes the cup suppliers to provide more compostable materials for their cups, and it takes the "coffee process engineer" (someone must have that title, right?) to develop a process that does not require the cups, and can handle any size cup. Dunkin Donuts has a process that is not dependent on cup size, so it definitely is possible.

I'm not trying to pick on McDonald's. They are an easy target, and to their credit, they have been making an attempt to do the right thing. The problem exists in every business we frequent.

Keep pushing. Keep asking for more eco-friendly solutions. You may inspire the coffee process engineer behind you in line without even realizing it!

Training people on Going Green

I work at a large company that has 20,000 employees worldwide, however, there has not been any environmental training on what they can do to 'go green' while at work. It seems like such an obvious thing to do: train your employees to take simple steps to reduce their impact on the environment. The training is pretty simple, and the potential business impact is enormous.

What we concluded was that there wasn't any off-the-shelf training that could be easily and quickly deployed, so we decided to make one available, for free, on our website.

http://www.helpsaveearth.org/free_going_green_work_training.asp

We feel that if people are trained at work (where they have a captive audience and reporting hierarchy), we can make a bigger impact on communicating these simple steps, rather than trying to communicate to the masses using numerous methods, with varying amounts of detail and explanation. The viral effect within a work environment are much stronger than in real life. For example, it just takes one manager of 100 people to email a green presentation, and require that their direct reports watch it. They are essentially being paid to watch it, and they will because their boss asked them to. In the real world, your friend might email you the same presentation, but what motivation is there to watch it?

We also feel that once people start taking simple steps at work, it will quickly transfer to the home, and they will look for ways to save at home.

Old shower tiles

I decided I needed to update my bathroom, if I wanted to even have a chance of selling my home. I have a shower/bath combo (standard in most homes), but I needed to update it. After talking to my handyman friend, we decided to rip out the bathtub and put a walk-in shower.

Two green decisions: What to do with the old bathtub and tiles? What to buy for the new tiles?

For the bathtub, I had no idea where to turn to get it "recycled" or reused somehow. I wish I knew who to ask, because I ended up setting it on the curb to be hauled away. I wanted to bury it in the yard and make a fish pond out of it, but I knew I would never have the time to complete that task. Strike one!

The tiles that were removed were saved into a box (my request). I spend a couple hours cleaning and sorting through the mess of drywall and paper backing to figure out how many tiles I had remaining. I wanted to give them away to someone, but we didn't have a ReStore type of place nearby that I could drop them off.
(Update: Later I realized we did in fact have a ReStore, I just never knew about it!)

I decided to go on craigslist and see if anyone was interested. Luckily, I had a taker, and I was able to give her some free tiles to redo her bathroom, and I was able to ease my conscience about the bathtub. Going green is definitely a process, something that takes diligence and patience. It would have been easy to just throw the tiles away and avoided a few hours of labor, but I'm glad I did it.

Finally, I had to find new tiles. I didn't have a lot of time to find what I wanted, and didn't have the money to get exactly what I wanted. The prices I was getting for tiles made out of recycled material ranged from $5-12 per square foot. This was quite the increase over the $1.50/sq ft price that I could get from Lowes. (Again, if I had known about the ReStore, I could have saved some serious money, and avoided another green mistake). I unfortunately chose the new tiles from Lowes.

Overall, one positive (the tiles) and two negatives (bathtub and new tiles). Not feeling real good about it. Lost this battle, but determined to win the war...