

Betacup Challenge - Design A Sustainable Coffee Cup  - Tichy
http://www.thebetacup.com/

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philk
I have a hard time seeing how this is anything other than a feel-good
distraction that provides little in the way of real benefits. Non-disposable
coffee cups do not make up a meaningful proportion of our environmental
footprint as a whole.

If there's a need to change something (such as environmental footprint) then
use market mechanisms[1] to implement it.

[1] For example, if landfill needs to be reduced one could charge money based
on volume/weight of rubbish collected.

~~~
Tichy
What's wrong with a feel-good distraction? Instead of implementing "Hello
World" in 120 languages, why not tinker with papercup designs?

~~~
philk
I don't have a problem with someone tinkering with coffee cup designs if it
gives them enjoyment. I just find the pretense that it's going to make a non-
negligible difference to the environment puzzling and intellectually
dishonest.

 _What's wrong with a feel-good distraction? Instead of implementing "Hello
World" in 120 languages, why not tinker with papercup designs?_

Why not do something actually meaningful?

There's an awesome talk by Richard Hamming on pg's website
(<http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html>), where he recounts:

 _And I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?'' And
after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?'' And after
some more time I came in one day and said, ``If what you are doing is not
important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important,
why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had
to find somebody else to eat with!_

~~~
Tichy
"58 billion paper coffee cups" doesn't sound so negligible to me? Sure, it is
might not be as paramount as plugging the oil spill to me, but perhaps making
a small impact is better than no impact.

I just mentioned the 120 programming languages because I am sure that post
would make it on HN, too.

Are you working on superimportant stuff all the time?

Also read Richard Feynman's books - he claims when he was stuck for a while,
he only managed to make progress again when he started to do calculations on
the rotation of thrown paper cups just for fun for a while. He later derived
some quantum mechanics stuff from those paper cup equations.

------
retube
My brother takes his own cups and receptacles to coffee shops and take-away
joints. On more than one occasion the cardboard coffee cup / styrofoam tray
was used as a measuring device, before then being thrown away, leading to much
"you're missing the point" frustration.

~~~
sp332
You just have to train them! <http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/dear-vancouver-
barristas>

~~~
MaysonL
One of my favorite coffee joints (at the local library} actually gives you a
discount for bringing your own cup. [it also has cream instead of half-and-
half]

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gorm
Clay cups work fine in India and they are sustainable
<[http://chaipilgrimage.com/2008/09/14/the-indian-clay-
cup/...](http://chaipilgrimage.com/2008/09/14/the-indian-clay-cup/>);

~~~
patio11
Sustainable just means "more flattering to my sense of aesthetics than the
alternatives." It is highly non-obvious to me that producing paper cups is
more resource intensive than producing clay cups, or that waste produced by
clay cups is easier to store than waste produced by paper cups.

Clay cups, for example, require dredging up a whole lot of water and river
mud, which (despite the fact that it is done inefficiently by poor people,
which is apparently the working definition for "environmentally conscious" for
reasons I do not pretend to understand) is not an ecologically neutral action.
Scale it to Starbucks level consumption and that is an awful lot of river mud.
11 million metric tonnes, by my back of the envelope math. Plus whatever
energy you use in construction of the cups, which aren't exactly carving
themselves out of the mud in a carbon-neutral fashion.

This could be averted, of course, if people would simply _consume less coffee_
, but that might be a bridge too far for the latte liberals at Starbucks. I'm
sure they'll find a cup which looks absolutely nothing like a paper cup, which
will ostentatiously proclaim that consuming _this_ cup of coffee makes you a
better person than consuming _that other_ cup of coffee, which is about 99% of
the purpose of environmentalism: social signaling of moral worth among rich
people for whom traditional religion holds little attraction.

~~~
Tichy
Maybe some other material could be found, that is less costly to produce than
paper or clay. I think for paper a lot of chemicals have to be used?

Didn't McDonalds experiment with "eatable" packages? Some grain (sweetcorn?)
might have the property of being easily molded into cups (think ice cream
cones). Then add some wax to make it water proof? Except I suppose wax would
melt from hot coffee? Also, growing corn requires water, too.

Just as an example - you don't have to treat sweetcorn with chemicals to make
it moldable. Maybe a lot of properties of paper are not required for coffee
cups, so a simpler material could be used.

~~~
what
Are you talking about PLA and the like? It's pretty much a
biodegradable/compostable plastic made from corn starch or sugarcane. I've
seen utensils made from it in some cafeterias. But they can make lots of
things with it, here they make coffee cups:
<http://www.cagreen.ca/Hot%20Cups-0>

~~~
Tichy
I wonder if the makers of the betacup challenge were aware of that - I suppose
not...

~~~
what
They might still consider it "wasteful" since the same number of cups would be
thrown away. But I believe they can be made with the waste products from the
processing of corn or sugarcane that already happens.

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decklin
I don't think any of these designs will help if they continue to give them
away for free.

~~~
patio11
I'm absolutely flabbergasted at how effectively the supermarkets in my town
changed behavior by charging for bags. Of course, it helps that they're a
cartel: if any store in this neighborhood hadn't adopted the "5 yen per bag OR
bring your own" on the same day, they would have done quite a bit of business.

I even bought myself a shopping bag, even though my math brain told me that I
would likely have to live in Japan for at least another six years until I had
recouped the $9 it cost me.

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jhaglund
what wrong with people carrying their own travel mug?

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00015CMVE/>

is what i carry everywhere

~~~
Groxx
I was kind of thinking the same thing. Can we submit the no-cup design, where
one simply does not supply disposable cups? People would get used to bringing
their own mug pretty quickly, methinks.

~~~
Tichy
I picture a kind of coffee fountain, where people would catch coffee with
their palms, like they would from a well. Ouch.

~~~
Groxx
That'd oxidize the coffee too quickly though. It'd be gas-station, burned-in-
all-night coffee in 30 minutes.

Wounds heal. Good coffee is forever.

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rameshnid
My design would be a giant coffee shaped recycle bin in the coffee shop and
the 2 streets adjacent to it. Would lead to more effective recycling.

