A Cup that Saves Trees…Get Yours

This cup can save a lot of trees. In fact if all of the to-go coffee drinkers, and tea drinkers too, would get a cup like this we could save millions of trees every year! Actually, it doesn’t even have to be just like this one…..

There is a web site called Sustainability is Sexy (and I do agree it is) and they are dedicated to reducing the “bitter environmental, social and financial impacts of disposable coffee cups”. I love this. You can read all about the problems with to-go coffee cups, which include needing virgin paperboard, the non-decomposability of these plastic coated cups and how they release methane gas in landfills.

According to the web site, Americans will use somewhere between 16-23 billion paper coffee cups in 2010. Read that again…16-23 billion cups, and they seem to think that 23 billion is more accurate. That is a lot of cups and that means a lot of trees and a lot of methane producing cups in landfills. In 2006 Starbucks alone used 2.3 billion cups-that is 944,000 trees. This could be curtailed drastically with our own action-just bring your own. Imagine if there were no more to-go cups and you had to bring your own.

If you use to-go cups just think, taking this one step is so big.

I bought this one at my local coop but there are more and more like this out there. In fact L.L. Bean even carries one and they have free shipping right now too. But maybe there is already one waiting for you just down the street from where you are and you don’t even need to have it shipped.

So the bottom line is, every to-go coffee cup used is contributing to many problems, and causing more and more trees to be cut down and it’s unnecessary. All we have to do is make one small adjustment in our routine. Now once in a while is one thing, but I know that a lot of people are getting their coffee every day this way and I bet some days more than once. I keep mine in the car so that if I want a cup of tea or coffee on the go I have my own cup.

To tell you the truth I think that it tastes a lot better too…no plastics—do you think that could make a difference?