178
Sip, return, repeat’: US city tackles throwaway cup culture with first-of-its-kind system
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
178 points (98.4% liked)
News
23014 readers
6 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Forget sanitation, why are we making any kind of environmental solution out of plastic? Can people not bring a metal cup to the coffee shop?
Using a thin walled metal cup would be super hot and burn people. But using an insulated metal cup would get people to keep them. Idk how to solve that. Make something safe but worthless enough to return.
Ask people to bring their own washed cup with the appropriate capacity. If they don't have one, provide them with a reusable cup they have to pay extra for.
You have to make people pay to overcome the path of least effort that single use plastics opened.
Just like paid plastic bags in supermarkets, I believe it works well.
Yep: What has worked to fight climate change? Policies where someone pays for polluting, study finds
I have a sneaking suspicion that at least in some US states this would be problematic with local health departments. I do not know, but it seems these departments might look askance at Joe Schmo handing an un-verifiably “clean” container into the food service area and hands of the workers.
I suspect that making metal insulated cups is cheap these days. Perhaps this could solve that. I doubt people would hoard mountains of them. Then it becomes a matter of paying for the hoarded ones. People hoarded and still do some glass bottles where glass bottle replacement schemes exist/have existed.
Thinking more on this point, a genuine replacement for single use plastics for beverages could be a soda can equivalent, cheap, double wall aluminum container. If someone can make such a container for low enough cost, that could be a solution since aluminum is infinitely recyclable.
Metal as a whole but especially aluminum transfers heat really well the way to stop that is to create a vacuum between the walls of the cup which costs significantly more than plastic forming, then that vacuum can be readily damaged if it’s dropped and it’s even recommended that it isn’t put through heavy dishwasher cycles which both are likely to occur. Finally you have the issue that people would just keep them for home as the double walled cups can be expensive which would mean they aren’t available in shops and thus you have to use more single use plastics. While plastic cups don’t sound great this plan would reduce overall plastic usage