Whether it’s those K-cups or your daily Tim Hortons fix, single serve cups are environmentally unfriendly, wasteful and they are contributing to the world’s overall pollution problem. Do you use disposable cups, plates or other items on a daily basis at home? Probably not because it would cost too much money in the end. We have somehow moved into a disposable society that thinks it’s ‘normal’ to use a plastic bottle, a paper or styrofoam cup or other plastic items once and then throw them away. Some people continue to do it because of how convenient it is and how inconvenient it is to wash and carry a reusable water bottle or mug. That excuse just can’t be acceptable when we consider the amount of material and energy it takes to make the products and how much the waste is adding to the pollution factor, the amount of waste we are producing yearly and the contribution to climate change.

Half of the world’s plastic goes into products that are used only once.

~ Keep Cup

Canadians drink a lot of coffee, the third high consuming country in the world according to Euromonitor International. Tim Hortons alone serves over 2 billion cups of coffee a year – that’s a lot of coffee cups that can’t be recycled. That number doesn’t even include coffee cups sold at McDonalds, Starbucks or other fast food companies. All of that coffee, and other beverages, are more often than not being served in a cup made of paper which is then coated, which makes it more difficult to recycle. Producing that many cups takes hundreds of thousands of trees and millions of gallons of water to produce. After a short amount of time being used, that cup then gets thrown into landfill where it will take hundreds of years to decompose, specifically because of the coating needed to make the paper cup hold water. Landfills contribute to the production of methane, which is 16 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

So What Can We Do?

There are many things that can be done to make a difference:

  Reduce your consumption of beverages from stores. Make a tea or coffee at home in a regular mug or travel mug.

Have a cup of coffee in the comfort of your own home.

  Use a reusable cup or container to drink your coffee or tea from. The coffee shops even offer these products and will give you a discount on your coffee for using them.

Get a travel mug and take it with you. Save on refills too!

   Recycle these single use cups wherever possible and write to your local politicans to increase access and requirements for recycling.

Recycle whenever possible.

Sources:

@uhntalkintrash. “Wake up and Smell the Coffee.” Talkin’ Trash With UHN. N.p., 07 Oct. 2014. Web. 27 Dec. 2016.

“Coffee.” Coffee Market Reports, Market Share, Statistics, Trends. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Dec. 2016.

Furdyk, Brent. “11 Things You Didn’t Know about Tim Hortons.” Global News. N.p., 09 Feb. 2016. Web. 27 Dec. 2016.