I cant live without it. There is no other product out there that performs for the money like a Styrofoam cup. It handles heat and cold, protects your hand, doesn't sweat, keeps the temperature of your drink better than anything, is cheap and easy to store. What's not to love?
Oh ya, it's really bad for the environment and we cant recycle it!
The Starbucks cup with a sleeve is their answer to the problem. I haven't found mine yet. Replacing water bottles with a reusable one was easy, but how do I get a green alternative to Styrofoam?
Let me let you in on a dirty little secret. Styrofoam is very recyclable. It's just that we don't because the economics don't work. It turns out that Styrofoam is too light yet bulky making shipping it way too expensive. So if you have a Styrofoam recycler close by it may be included in your recycling program. Otherwise, Styrofoam is verboten so it goes into the landfill to last, well...forever.
Here in Dallas we have some drop off opportunities for big chunks, packing and even peanuts, but no cups or food containers. (Metro Foam). So my cups remain homeless. We do wash them if they aren't stained but eventually they go in the trash.
I was willing to live with this issue as is until my latest walk at the lake after a big rain. The usual ton of plastic bottles were there but interspersed among them was Styrofoam! Huge amounts of little bits! It was even more of an eyesore than the bottles....it's everywhere!
Now what do I do? I can't live with them and I don't want to live without them.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Uh, a mug? What would Starbucks do if you showed up with your own mug, throw you out? Plus a mug keeps your hands warm in the winter. Or save money and make your coffee at home or work.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, what is Styrofoam necessary for?
There are packing materials that are recyclable and just as good - thick compressed cardboard, think the Arnold of egg cartons, I looked into that when I worked for a computer manufacturer, for stuff that's usually shipped in formed Styrofoam.
Packing regular stuff - giant wads of kraft paper or newspaper.
p.s. I think the giant trash islands in the oceans are largely plastic.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.physorg.com/news112248742.html
I do occasionally pour coffee into them as to-go cups of if I am going outside. But where we really use them is for cold drinks outside. That includes when we have friends over.
ReplyDeleteHere in Dallas we get enough humidity that any other material sweats...a lot, and your drink gets watery from the heat.
We buy them 500 at a time for less than $20.00! I'd probably use that much in water just washing something else... We spend a lot of time outside so we use that many in about a year and a half.
I did find a double walled paper cup for about 30 times the price.
As for that trash island I have heard about it but never seen it...going to go looking tomorrow on utube and google maps...
333 Styrofoam cups a year...starts to feel sick...
ReplyDeleteHow about making ice cubes from whatever the drink is, then when the ice cubes melt, the drink doesn't get watery. Unless just the condensation on the cup is watering it down?
The $20 in washing expense is nothing compared to the mountain of 333 cups I am seeing. In ten years that's 3333 cups...
100% non-biodegradable. Who was it who said something like when our descendants 1,000,000 years from now (back then, they used to think we'd still have a habitable planet in 1,000,000 years) are sitting on the back porch in their rockers, and little Johnnie is digging in the dirt, he'll unearth a perfectly preserved plastic bottle, as intact as the day it was made.
Ok, ok, I've got problems. Or do I?
ReplyDeleteI honestly believe that the problem is one that can be solved. I am trying to find out why my cups are pariahs at the Styrofoam recycling place.
I would bet that 95% of what I saw at the lake are Styrofoam cups. Many fast food and casual sit down places use them (at least here in Texas).
So there is a huge gap between the recyclers and the market. They have the luxury to shun the product yet there is a huge amount. And, as I noted, there isn't a good replacement.
I am also willing to bet that a Starbucks paper cup and my Styrofoam will sit in a landfill for the next thousand years. Stuff has a hard time rotting anaerobically. But agreed, my cup will last a whole lot longer.
I made a mistake above. Plastic keeps its integrity(sic) forever. Styrofoam comes apart into smaller pieces, but the pieces, how do I say this, they are still Styrofoam, and the fish etc. ingest them and it messes up their innards.
ReplyDeleteSome places like Whole Foods, here anyway, have alternatives to Styrofoam clamshells. Again they're using compressed paper.
Yes, I think there is something fundamentally wrong with our landfills that stuff is packed in and never has a chance to degrade. They have to fix that.
Plus, individuals can try for less waste. I started out recycling. Then I whined to manufacturers and shippers about their use of excess or "bad" packaging and I stopped buying, as much as possible, stuff with bad packaging.
Now instead of recycling paper, I put most of it in my compost pile. Uhh, I shred it to aid in decomposition, not sure how my minishredder does in energy use. I am thinking maybe instead of shredding, I should just rip it up. And I still recycle paper that I think won't compost well.
I stopped buying frozen dinners that have plastic containers. Amy's does very well with paper containers, everyone else could too. And I am making more stuff from scratch or from cans, since the cans are recyclable but frozen dinner containers are not.
I would like to get to a zero waste leaves the property household. I have a way to go yet, but I am probably throwing out half as much as I was a year ago. I can carry my trash container with one hand on its way to the curb.
Found this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.co.emmet.mi.us/dpw/norecyclerec.htm#Styrofoam
Well done...you're way ahead of me.
ReplyDeleteYou have guilted me into getting to the bottom of my cup problem. I have emails out to industry groups and manufacturers about the cup issue.
I have yet to find any data on how many pounds or numbers of EPS cups are produced every year. Or what's recycled. My guess is it isn't pretty.
This one seems prime for a take back law if it isn't recycled.
Thanks for the link...I have found many of those. There are lots of Styrofoam recyclers, they just don't want to deal with the mess and cost of dirty cups and food containers/plates etc. But hey, our city recycling doesn't take pizza boxes for the same reason.
ReplyDeleteThe rub in my view isnt so much the land fill as it's the likelihood of those cups traveling around our environment unconstrained. They blow easily, float and get smaller by the minute until you cant really pick them up.
A glass, aluminum, tin, paper or plastic container are all easily picked up and disposed of, or recycled.
Btw, Styrofoam is a brand of Dow Chemical. No Styrofoam is used for cups and plates etc. It's all the blue sheets for home insulation.
Expanded Poly Styrene or EPS is the proper term but maybe if we keep calling it Styrofoam the real manufacturers will escape scrutiny.